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Community Production



Community Production





We stand at the threshold of an epochal change in the history of work. The changes now emerging will be as incisive as the leap into the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. One important question will be how we use the possibilities of new technologies for the labor market. Directly connected with the labor market of the future is the production of the future. It is a hybrid of bits and bites. And it will be made by all of us.

The tools we gave out of our hands in the course of industrialization are tools we want to reclaim. With advanced technology we aim at forms of communal self-production. Workshops with high-tech DIY machines can be the factories of the future.

Community Formation

Production capacity in these community workshops is already impressive and advanced in part today. The Grand Garage in the Tabakfabrik Linz is equipped, among other things, with fabricators, laser cutters, computer-controlled milling machines, and robots.

During the industrial age, most work was done with muscle power; it was dull, grinding, exhausting physical labor. In the post-industrial age, this work will be done almost entirely by machines. Two thirds of all work can then be work that makes one stronger, is attuned to oneself, advances one, and serves self-realization. That represents enormous progress, because in the past only small privileged elites – artists, intellectuals, and inventors – could enjoy the hearty elixir of such work. This can now change.

Community Production is green like lucky clover

Community Formation in an alternative economy

NANK wants to create free space for ideas and action that are not yet on the market. The priority is bringing people and cultural techniques together with suitable technologies. Neighborhood centers with autonomous, regional production in small spaces make it possible for everyone, for example, to breed fish themselves or simply make everyday objects themselves and thereby shape part of their own work.

The chance to invest two thirds of one’s own work deliberately in one’s own development may make possible what neither democracy nor education nor prosperity has achieved: we, the people – and this includes the 85 percent who until now had to row the galleys – will finally have the chance to mature into fully developed human beings.

Computers are used at home to burn DVDs, make books, furniture, and spare parts oneself. But this is only the beginning. Technological possibilities are emerging for making a large share of the things we need ourselves – in one’s own workshop, at home, or, even more economically and sustainably, in a kind of community center. The role of producer, distributor, and consumer is thus fundamentally changing.

To escape more easily from the stranglehold of the decaying job system, we need a completely new economy. The backbone of this new economy consists in our moving incessantly, step by step, toward an economic form in which we make our own products and thereby gain resilience. It is not only about producing tomatoes or jam intelligently. It is also about producing our own tools, our own infrastructure, our own capacity to act.




In classical wage-labor society, optimizing a company means optimizing “human resources”, as the phrase so nicely goes. What is meant are human beings and willing employees. New Work after Bergmann counters this efficiency mania with a sustainable strengthening of the individual’s free will and a collaborative spirit on equal footing. Working with one another, with the vigorous aid of empowering technology, becomes an exploration and discovery. The core statement is: “Work on what you really, really want!”

This important nucleus of freedom joins craft in “Community Production” and links work on high-tech DIY machines with a proper dose of entrepreneurial spirit. Finding out what one wants, finding one’s “calling”, can help defuse problems in the labor market. Allowing a little more flamboyance for what is uniquely one’s own to make, and a cleverly linked network of collaboration in connection with entrepreneurship and fair remuneration mechanisms, can offer protection against job loss, decline, and poverty.


Gespräch zwischen Mark Linsenmayer und Frithjof Begmann zu Community Production ( in englischer Sprache)



Mark Linsenmayer and Frithjof Bergmann discuss, on December 10, 2013, an important component of New Work: community production, also known as high-tech self-providing. Instead of acquiring all goods by buying them with wage money, you make them yourself by using advanced technologies that can be used, or soon will be usable, in community centers.

Community Production is a form of local economy in which people produce goods themselves by means of adequate production technology. In particular, fabricators and automated machines that are easy to handle, powerful, and multifunctional make it possible to provide for oneself: “We could develop a series of devices, apparatuses, materials, machines, and methods of production that would enable us, or a not very large group of people, to make 60 to 80 percent of what we need to live ourselves.” (The Era of New Work, interview with Frithjof Bergmann, Focus, No. 24/1999, p. 140).

Local Economy

The application of production technology for an economy based on self-provisioning makes “individual production” possible: “In place of gigantic production halls with many robots come more versatile individual robots that allow individual production. They make chairs and tables according to our designs and ideas, sew clothes, or cut car parts.” (The Era of New Work, interview with Frithjof Bergmann, Focus, No. 24/1999, p. 140).

Individual production means that every person makes what they need for themselves. Production and consumption are therefore determined by the human being. This distinguishes Community Production both from traditional self-provisioning and from the prevailing economy with its industrial mass production.

Traditional self-provisioning is “naturally” limited in scope. It has to orient itself to what can be wrested from nature. Ultimately it is nature that determines what and how much can be produced and consumed. In this respect, traditional self-provisioning always also means a relatively modest material standard of living. Community Production does not know this kind of self-sufficiency. Rather, it is the individual need of the respective person that determines production, meaning it serves to satisfy individual needs. Community Production guarantees production independent of natural production factors. What can be produced does not depend on nature, but on technology. Thanks to technological development, Community Production makes possible a self-provisioning that is incomparably more versatile and demanding than traditional self-provisioning:
• Fabricators and networked computer-machine systems make it possible to produce everyday objects such as clothing, shoes, dishes, household appliances, and furniture, as well as non-everyday things such as jewelry and works of art.
• “Food houses” and procedures such as permaculture make food production possible in the city. People can thereby provide themselves with food in a simple and, above all, inexpensive way.
• New methods of building will make house construction possible for far more people than is currently the case. At present, owning one’s own four walls has become so expensive that fewer and fewer can afford it; whoever does afford it takes on a decades-long financial burden that becomes a millstone around the neck for many. Housing, which is a basic human need, should be affordable for everyone. This will be achieved when one can build simply and on one’s own responsibility.

The use of “high tech” implies that Community Production is not a return to nature and therefore not a return to heavy physical labor or muscle power. Rather, Community Production uses the most modern, advanced technology in such a way that the main burden of work is not borne by human beings but by machines. In contrast to traditional self-provisioning, Community Production is not laborious, exhausting, and draining, but creative, shaping, stimulating, and self-determined. It is not human labor power that is demanded, but the human mind that makes use of technology.

While self-provisioning in earlier times had to manage without much technology, or, by its own self-understanding, did not make technology as much its own as it could have, Community Production positively relies on it. One can put it this way: what labor power is for classical self-provisioning, technology is for Community Production. This leads to another distinction: while traditional self-provisioning was time-consuming and left little time for other things, Community Production wants precisely to limit the time needed to produce what is necessary.

An example to illustrate this is the automatic washing machine. While washing in earlier times was laborious drudgery that often took several days, especially in winter, washing today has become such child’s play that it is hardly perceived as effort anymore. The washing machine has largely taken over the work of washing and freed us from it. It is therefore simply impossible to imagine everyday life without it – even the greatest enemy of technology has one in the basement and no longer wants to do without it. The automatic washing machine shows what matters in technology: namely to ease necessary work for us in a practical, useful, effective, and efficient way, and where possible to take it away from us.

High Tech

The use of “high tech” implies that Community Production is not a return to nature and therefore not a return to heavy physical labor or muscle power. Rather, Community Production uses the most modern, advanced technology in such a way that the main burden of work is not borne by human beings but by machines. In contrast to traditional self-provisioning, Community Production is not laborious, exhausting, and draining, but creative, shaping, stimulating, and self-determined. It is not human labor power that is demanded, but the human mind that makes use of technology. While self-provisioning in earlier times had to manage without much technology, or, by its own self-understanding, did not make technology as much its own as it could have, Community Production positively relies on it. One can put it this way: what labor power is for classical self-provisioning, technology is for Community Production. This leads to another distinction: while traditional self-provisioning was time-consuming and left little time for other things, Community Production wants precisely to limit the time needed to produce what is necessary. An example to illustrate this is the automatic washing machine. While washing in earlier times was laborious drudgery that often took several days, especially in winter, washing today has become such child’s play that it is hardly perceived as effort anymore. The washing machine has largely taken over the work of washing and freed us from it. It is therefore simply impossible to imagine everyday life without it – even the greatest enemy of technology has one in the basement and no longer wants to do without it. The automatic washing machine shows what matters in technology: namely to ease necessary work for us in a practical, useful, effective, and efficient way, and where possible to take it away from us.

The Difference

Community Production and the prevailing economic system differ fundamentally and in every respect:
• Like every form of self-provisioning, Community Production brings about the unity of production and consumption; our economic system, by contrast, separates precisely these two areas, which makes mediation through markets necessary. In such a market economy no one is autarkic; everyone depends on everyone else and especially on the market. Community Production aims at the economic autonomy of the individual. That means dependency on markets is abolished, and with it their dominance and the constraints they impose on us.
• The currently prevailing economic form is a private economy, whereas Community Production represents a “public economy”. In it, the means of production are public or quasi-public goods in corresponding facilities. Only then is it guaranteed that they are accessible to all people and that their use is affordable for everyone. In the private economy, by contrast, the means of production are privately owned. This makes the mass of people who are propertyless in this sense doubly dependent: first, they depend on what is produced for consumption. They themselves cannot decide what is produced and what is not. Second, their work depends on production, which is why one speaks of “dependent employees”. Without production there is no work; without employers there are no employees.
• It goes without saying that work differs essentially in the two economic forms. In the private economy, people work for a third party: for the employer, for the market, for production, for money, and so on. Community Production, by contrast, means working for oneself.
• Community Production takes place in self-provisioning centers that, unlike our present companies or factories, are small. This is partly because these centers do not produce masses, but individual production; and partly because the production technology required for this is multifunctional, so only a few machines are needed.
• Market economy inevitably brings competition with it: just as companies compete with one another for market share, people compete for jobs. The globalization of the economy intensifies this competition, to whose constraints people have to submit. This competition disappears in Community Production, because each person produces their own material basic provision – and in doing so does not stand in competition with others.
• Our current economic system is growth-oriented or growth-driven and therefore boundless. Community Production not only abolishes the separation of production and consumption, it also limits them. While our economy wants to produce the largest possible quantities, “individual production” is oriented toward small quantities, thereby preventing excesses. Self-provisioning knows no overproduction, no bubbles, and no resulting financial and economic crises of the kind that currently shake our economic system.
• Mass production and mass consumption place a considerable burden on the environment; every ecological improvement of a product is neutralized by the increase in production demanded by economic growth; the globalization of the economy wants to spread the Western material lifestyle across the earth, which far exceeds its carrying capacity. Community Production, by contrast, is characterized by limitations of many different kinds that benefit the environment: it replaces industrial mass production with individual production; mass consumption gives way to individual need fulfillment; economic growth is a foreign word for Community Production. It is not the absurdly artificially inflated material lifestyle of the West, not its consumer frenzy, that is carried into the world, but a basic provision that can be individually shaped. Since Community Production is local economy, it decisively reduces the immense global transport of goods, which contributes substantially to environmental pollution. At the same time, it abolishes the now prevailing separation of life and work that spread with the economic and job system. This reduces the disastrous mass commuting to and from work worldwide, which also means less environmental pollution. Apart from that, thousands upon thousands of traffic jams are avoided in which we senselessly waste our time and nerves.

• Community Production starts from individually limited needs; consequently, production and consumption are limited as well. In contrast, the prevailing economic system propagates limitless needs, to be met by constantly increasing production and consumption. The only thing that dampens or limits mass production and mass consumption is money. It is the money available to us that decides what we can buy and therefore consume. Without money we could not satisfy our needs or pay homage to consumption, which would immediately affect production. What is decisive, therefore, is that producers and consumers have sufficient money, or access to additional money in the form of credit; then, monetarily speaking, nothing stands in the way of increasing production and consumption.
• While the prevailing economic system depends entirely on money, Community Production decisively reduces this dependency: the more people provide for themselves, the fewer goods they have to buy; the less money the individual needs in order to make a living. In place of earning and spending money comes self-production. For the sake of contrast, Frithjof Bergmann therefore calls the economy of “New Work” an “economy of minimal buying” as opposed to the prevailing economy, which he characterizes as an “economy of maximal buying” (Frithjof Bergmann, New Work-New Culture, Arbor Verlag, 2004, p. 316).

Incidentally, self-provisioning is cheaper than buying goods. It is often claimed that mass production is cheaper than individual production. But that is a “myth”: a large part of the price of a product often consists not of production costs, but of other costs such as transport, advertising, packaging, storage, distribution structure, intermediaries, and overhead costs of all kinds. All of these disappear in self-production.

Self-production is also advantageous where production costs are high. Anyone who has ever bought a house knows how expensive it is. But whoever can build their house in an effective and efficient way – and that is precisely the concern of Community Production – will massively reduce the costs of home ownership. In any case, the cost reduction, or the value one creates through one’s own work, will amount to more than an average earner could earn in money through employment in the same time. At the same time, the self-provider saves many incidental costs, of which the outrageously high broker fees are the most annoying and unnecessary.

Community Production is an economic approach that can be applied worldwide, especially since it has solutions ready for problems to which conventional economics has no answer: Community Production can counteract the global rural exodus, since such a self-provisioning center can be implemented in every village; it can make basic provision possible in the growing slums of the world, where regular jobs are scarce; and Community Production can give work to the masses who, in view of global population growth, stream onto the labor market and find no jobs there.

Suppose Community Production were to prevail and the world’s population could be materially provided for by it sufficiently; suppose individually definable self-provisioning could be achieved with limited effort: the economy would no longer be an end in itself, but a means to an end. Concretely: its function would be to create the necessary condition for “free work”.


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New Work – New Culture



Understand Frithjof Bergmann’s New Work, explore example projects, and much more.



For Frithjof Bergmann, the point is that every person can find work in harmony with their own wishes, hopes, dreams, and talents, and that reorganizing work is the key to an alternative and a new culture.

Work can be understood as a polarity: work can exhaust and drain, but it can also be the opposite – something that gives strength, draws us into life, and gives us meaning. When it comes to work, and when we talk about sustainability in society, we should be interested in the question of power. The power that gives freedom, but also the power of better concepts of work, is the subject of this text. On the meta level it is an invitation to think about whether we want to remain servants of other masters, or whether we should take our fate more firmly into our own hands. To answer this, we first try to reach an understanding of the discussion around the “Grand Challenges” against which the world is struggling. Among these challenges, the gap between the obscenely rich and the devastatingly poor has a special position for “New Work”. We consider how the deepening trenches between the “desert people”, who have hardly any resources, and the “oasis people”, who revel in luxury, might be bridged. There seems to be no remedy for this. Unless a loud and comprehensible voice for something “new” begins to form. This new thing is often linked with hopes about digitalization. Over time, however, we have had to revise some of these romantic ideas of freedom through the digital network. Alienated, alone, and angry is what the digital revolution has really done to us. We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead we found ourselves confused, mistrustful, and without orientation.





D. Rushkoff warns: “The digital economy is going wrong. Everyone knows it, but nobody knows exactly why, let alone how to fix it. Workers are losing to automation, drivers are losing to Uber, investors are losing to algorithms, hotels are losing to Airbnb, and even tech developers are losing their visions to the demands of the start-up economy.”
It is not the digital itself, but rather the way we apply it. More a legacy of early corporatism and central currencies than a feature of digital technology. We are running the 21st-century digital economy on a 13th-century operating system.

The operating system for the next epoch could be New Work after Bergmann, with AI and blockchain as important tools for it.

So that this application of technology does not go wrong again, New Work New Culture considers which ethics, which concepts, and which terms this innovation requires, and negotiates the question of how the transition to a more sustainable society could succeed. Which alternatives to the world of work and to the growth economy are being attempted, and which strategies are crystallizing? We also highlight commonalities between different initiatives and schools (common-good economy, post-growth economy, basic income, Theory U, solidarity economy, Transition Towns, peer economy, New Work). In the analysis of today’s work society, we emphasize positive changes and diagnose an intensive shared movement of reflection in order to shape the important process of upheaval that is emerging in a deep transformation of the relations between economy, politics, government, and civil society.



Where are we going? How do we want to live?

In the part-time revue we call life, we are slowly coming to recognize that as a society we are somehow stuck. We can go neither forward nor back. The most beautiful side effect of this “dystopia” is that we can now recreate life itself, recode it. Out there is a new world, and in this new world you can redefine at every moment who you damn well want to be.

Navigating uncertainty

We could once again stand before the blank canvas and wait, wait, wait … endure ourselves … mirror the world within us, turn it around, and then, when we are certain, paint the next picture: the next picture of our society. Let us try to await the moment in which the new arises within us and then have the courage to bring the new into the picture in broad gestures.

New Work New Culture – tools for the next economy

What we need for this is the will and a few tools. We want to develop these further with `share your factory`. Our tools revolve around co-design, human-machine interfaces, and circular-economy solutions. They are intelligent applications insofar as they make networking, excitement, and also evaluation possible. Beyond that, we are for the first time connecting blockchain with micro-production.


„Es geht uns um die Schaffung einer Gesellschaft und Kultur, in der wirklich jeder, Mann oder Frau, die Chance bekommt, einen beträchtlichen Teil seiner Zeit mit einer Arbeit zu verbringen, die er oder sie erfüllend und faszinierend findet und die die Menschen aufbaut und ihnen mehr Kraft und mehr Vitalität gibt“, Frithjof Bergmann: Neue Arbeit, Neue Kultur. Freiamt 2004, S. 19.


Calling

The period around the coronavirus, with its unspeakable, hysterically excessive measures, did have one good side. Many people understood that change in work is possible and very present, and that control must not only come from outside, but also happens bottom up – and that this transformation begins, not least, with each individual. This pause was an impulse for NWNC to push once more in the attempt to bring about a model of work that makes it easier for all people on this planet to do what they really, really want. When asking what one is especially good at, where one senses meaning, happiness, and talent, it helps to negotiate wishes, longings, and abilities face to face. Nevertheless, for most people it is very difficult even to find out what they really, really want.
Sometimes it is a film, sometimes a conversation. Everyone probably has their own experiences. In any case, it already helps to have guidance and assistance.

How does it work, how does one find out what one really, really wants? As Frithjof Bergmann says, one does not find it like a tennis ball under a green tree. It takes time, guidance, tools, and a lot of communication to find this out, and there are also traditional structures and weighty interests that stand in the way of democratizing work and production. But with the Covid virus holding us in its breath, we are also experiencing the greatest experiment in the history of humanity concerning work. New Work New Culture wants to reshape this transformation on three levels:
1. Personal perspective: Do what you really, really want! Realize opportunities on the path to fulfilling activity.
2. Organizational perspective: testing new solutions based on the principles of decentralization and co-creation.
3. Technological perspective: Fair Pay re-evaluates work by means of AI and DLT and thereby also supports relocalization and climate protection.

Community Production

Community Production, or “Distributed Microproduction”, is a universe of personal and social making. We connect concrete places, actors, and tools. Innovation approaches around code and production receive a stage and a showcase. In the learning world of the New Factory, design is developed that advances forms of collaborative production into future practice. With this set of cultural techniques, a universally modelable, decentralized system of work and production exists, stretching its tentacles deep into the city and out into the world.

Socio-techniques such as “Share your Factory”

Share Your Factory wants to update the operating system of production and uses the real experimental environment for this. In this context, the project opens up diverse spaces of possibility for novel value-creation concepts. Forms of collaboration and decentralization will continue to gain relevance, and with 1hWork innovation efforts and technological trends can be constantly implemented in production and fairly accounted for through work input.

The economic and social designs derived from this (visions and scenarios) in turn provide the necessary knowledge base for further steps around products and technology sets of decentralized microproduction.
With the New Factory we develop reference architecture and technology. Know-how transfer takes place through pop-up factories, home delivery, and communication and learning offers for schools, universities, and vocational support institutions. A DIY stream and the Your Own Fabric Box, which comes to the population, describe current engineering competencies in a playful way in connection with a competition format. The longer-term goal is the designer as factory. The construction of entire micro-machine parks and mini production lines.




„Jedem der an den verschiedenen Projekten Beteiligten war klar, dass die ökonomische Freiheit, welche die High Tech Eigenproduktion (Community Production) uns ermöglicht, auf lange Sicht eine unerlässliche Voraussetzung dafür ist, tatsächlich das tun zu können, was man wirklich, wirklich will. Das ist ohne den durch die HTEP erreichbaren Grad an materieller Unabhängigkeit nämlich nicht möglich. Wo diese nicht gegeben ist, wird der Druck der ‘Realität – oder dessen, was Bertolt Brecht ’die Verhältnisse’ nannte – uns zu beschämenden Kompromissen zwingen. … Wo sind die Werkzeuge, die Maschinen und Apparate, die Herstellungsmethoden, die uns in die Lage versetzen, das zu tun?“, Frithjof Bergmann: Neue Arbeit, Neue Kultur. Freiamt 2004, S. 22-23


Socio-techniques such as Share Your Factory

Share Your Factory wants to update the operating system of production and uses the real experimental environment for this. In this context, the project opens up diverse spaces of possibility for novel value-creation concepts. Forms of collaboration and decentralization will continue to gain relevance, and with 1hWork innovation efforts and technological trends can be constantly implemented in production and fairly accounted for through work input. The economic and social designs that can be derived from this (visions and scenarios) in turn provide the necessary knowledge base for further steps around products and technology sets of decentralized microproduction. With the New Factory we develop reference architecture and technology. Know-how transfer takes place through pop-up factories, home delivery, and communication and learning offers for schools, universities, and vocational support institutions. A DIY stream and the Your Own Fabric Box, which comes to the population, describe current engineering competencies in a playful way in connection with a competition format. The longer-term goal is the designer as factory. The construction of entire micro-machine parks and mini production lines.



Concrete Projects

New Work New Culture has a philosophical and theoretical background. The people who over the years connected themselves with Frithjof Bergmann’s ideas, however, have kept a very precise eye on practice because they are deeply convinced of his vision. Many projects are looking for ways to make the groundbreaking ideas about work simple and practically applicable in everyday life.

More about implementation




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Calling


Über die „Arbeit, die wir wirklich, wirklich wollen“






Although “New Work” is an alternative work system with different new forms of work, none has attracted as much attention, demand, and interest as the “work we really, really want”. It has virtually become its trademark. “The expression most associated with New Work is the repeated, recurring question about the work someone really, really wants to do.” (Frithjof Bergmann, New Work, New Culture, Arbor Verlag, Freiamt, 2004). It is therefore all the more important to show what Frithjof Bergmann understands by this specific work; otherwise it can and will easily be misunderstood. For as Hegel, on whose work Bergmann wrote his dissertation, already remarked in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”: “What is familiar is not understood merely because it is familiar.” This article therefore sets itself the task of presenting the “work we really, really want”. It is structured as follows: Part I presents premises and basic reflections by Bergmann that are constitutive for “New Work” and without which the “work we really, really want” cannot be understood comprehensively.

I Premises and Basic Reflections

1. The job system is characterized by a multitude of deficiencies:
• Automation, digitalization, and the rationalization of work mean that more and more jobs disappear. Technology increasingly replaces human labor. At the same time, population growth and rural exodus around the world produce countless workers every day, so the need for jobs grows. The shortage of jobs therefore becomes ever greater. Consequently, an alternative to the job is needed in order to make work possible for all people.
• The increase in global joblessness (as the reverse side of automation, digitalization, population growth, and rural exodus) is only one among many abuses in the job system. Others include performance pressure, pressure to succeed, overwork, monotony, stress, overload, precarious employment, and so on. These deficiencies are not disappearing; they are increasing, and new ones will be added. They make life difficult for human beings in every respect.
• The financial crisis ten years ago, and even more clearly the current Corona crisis, show how vulnerable the job system and economic system are. Within a very short time, millions of jobs can be destroyed, millions of people can fall into poverty, and the state must step in to rescue the system. This makes clear how urgently we need a more resilient, more humane, and more self-determined work system.
• The job system produces dependencies: on employers, on the labor market, on economic cycles, on location, on wages, on social insurance, on approval, on being useful in someone else’s plan. This dependency is often hidden behind the promise of security.
• The job system does not ask what people really want, what they are able to become, or what would make them more alive. It asks whether they fit into a job. This is the decisive difference.


Das Jobsystem - Thomas Schneider 2001, Praterstern Wien 2. Bezirk CC BY-NC 3.0


Has there been anything in the last few days that gave me an unexpected “pleasure”? If there was something like that, it is worth thinking about. From it one can derive what exactly gives you joy. And from that, in turn, one can conclude what you can do in order to feel this joy regularly. The whole process can take a very long time – and not only that: what we really, really want often changes. For this reason, the advisers in the Centers for New Work usually maintain a long-term relationship with their clients. How does it work? How does one find out what one really, really wants? Sometimes it is a film, sometimes a conversation; everyone probably has their own experiences here. In any case, it already helps to have guidance and assistance.


Frithjof Bergmann zum Calling



Mark Linsenmayer and Frithjof Bergmann discuss, on January 7, 2014 in the United States, an important component of New Work: vocations, that is, the “calling” itself, which animates people and gives life meaning. Overcoming the “poverty of desire”, vocational counseling, the professionalization of passion, and why “be realistic and get a job” is the wrong message for young people.



Polarity of Work

2. Bergmann speaks of the so-called “polarity of work” (Frithjof Bergmann: “New Work, New Culture”, Arbor Verlag, Freiamt, 2004, pp. 13-21). This refers to a fundamental spectrum of work, with “bad” work at one end and “good” work at the other. The job belongs to “bad” work for the reasons already mentioned. The job does not keep what it promises. It promises, for example, economic independence; in reality, however, it makes us deeply dependent on the labor market. Jobs are the fleshpots of our time. They usually offer money and security, but at the same time they enslave us and bind us to necessity. New Work wants to liberate us from this – it is the call to the “exodus from Egypt”.

“Good” work, by contrast, is work with which we identify, work that is meaningful to us, makes us proud, represents a real task, gives us strength and energy, lets us grow beyond ourselves, and to which we feel called. Whereas in the job we are a means and make ourselves into a means, here we are the purpose of the work.

3. Frithjof Bergmann belongs to that philosophical current which assumes that the human being is by nature a deficient being. According to this view, people are rather weak, inadequate, easily discouraged, quickly intimidated, and even ready to give themselves up.

The human being is the (only) being that can lose itself. For this reason, the wish to want something specific is often not developed, if it exists at all. Bergmann, following Hegel, calls this state “poverty of desire” (ibid., pp. 134-141 as well as pp. 328 and 348). In his texts he gives example after example to demonstrate this basic human condition – whether workers in automobile production in Flint, Michigan, street children in Vancouver, Native Americans on reservations, managers in companies, retirees, or university students.

At this point, another note may underline this image of the human being: if people were strong from childhood, bursting with purposefulness, determination, and self-confidence, so that nothing could throw them off course, if disorientation were a foreign word to them, why are psychotherapists’ waiting rooms full, and why are coaching and counseling offers multiplying for every situation in life?

To avoid misunderstanding: “poverty of desire” means a specific lack of wishes or “wanting”, namely the striving toward oneself. Many people have lost this “wanting oneself”, or never developed it in the first place. Instead, apathy, boredom, indifference, despair, or cynicism spread among some. Among others, the will is directed outward: toward money, career, vacation, power, security, and so on. Concern for this and that, but no concern for oneself. Many forces are designed to pull people away from themselves, distract them, and scatter them: advertising, consumption, vacation, entertainment, media. The job must not be missing from this list. Job work is work for others: for money, for the employer, for the labor market, for the career, for material prosperity. Job work is work for everything possible, only not for oneself.

II What Does It Mean: “Do What You Really, Really Want”?

In relation to what has been said so far, this new form of work means:
• it is an alternative to the job
• it wants to overcome the “poverty of desire”
• it is “free work” as opposed to “necessary work”
• it therefore means an increase in “freedom”
• it leads us to recognize ourselves more – it brings light into self-ignorance
• it causes the human being to become “more alive”, “stronger”, to “come to itself” and to do more justice to its possibilities.

Beyond that, explained through the individual words of the sentence, it means:

WHAT

What is the idea, the destiny, the possibility that is laid within us? Not just anything, nothing superficial, nothing fashionable, nothing corruptible, nothing foreign to me. Rather, what lies deep within us, what makes us ourselves, what we want entirely out of ourselves, something we absolutely, unconditionally, seriously, and passionately want to be.

DO

It is not enough to know what we want to do – we must also do the work that we really, really want. Doing mediates between idea and reality. Only when we do the work do we know whether it is the right one; and only when it is the right one does it have the corresponding positive effect on us, meaning that it “strengthens” and “empowers” us, makes us “more alive” and gives us “energy”, and so on.

REALLY, REALLY WANT

In accordance with the earlier statement that it is difficult for us to recognize ourselves, that we often misrecognize ourselves, it is obvious that it is not easy to find out what we “really, really want”. Our will can be mistaken, it can deceive us, it can want something that does not fit us and is foreign to us. At the beginning, our will is usually not oriented toward ourselves or toward our needs. Especially in our time, many social forces fight to influence our will in their own sense: advertising and business, entertainment and media, and so on constantly tell us that we should want this or that. No wonder we must be careful that our will does not become the plaything of external factors. This is also one reason for the formulation “really-really-wanting”. We must ask several times whether this or that is now what we “really, really want”. And if not, we must begin the search again. This procedure can be compared with the efforts of a writer who rewrites a text again and again until it expresses what they really want to say. In the same way, we must keep searching until we have identified what we “really, really want”.

III How Do We Help People Do “What They Really, Really Want”?

Against the background of the assumptions and premises described in Parts I and II, as well as the image of the human being in “New Work”, we derive an approach consisting of the following elements or steps:
• counseling
• presenting possibilities
• experimenting

It should be pointed out here that “New Work” does not rely only on counseling, but gives practice just as much space and time, if not more. This is already a first significant difference from many other forms of coaching and therapy that rely exclusively on conversation.
For this reason there should be “Centers for New Work” in which this approach can be practiced and institutionalized.
What follows are some explanations of the three elements mentioned, without claiming to be complete.

Counseling

“New Work” places special demands on counseling (and therefore on the counselor). Its high goal is to help people toward more aliveness and toward calling, which amounts to a “reversal” of their previous life.
The understanding of counseling, and the seriousness and necessity of counseling, arise from the image of the human being that we have presented on the preceding pages. Especially in the chapter on “self-ignorance” in his book, Bergmann explains that human beings need other human beings in order to recognize themselves, to come to themselves, and to get beyond their isolation, limitation, and previous condition. Counseling here is not a matter of service provision or an expert-client relationship, but of an interpersonal relationship in which the counselor must possess a high degree of knowledge of human beings in order to do justice to the person opposite them. Considering that people who come to us are dissatisfied with their previous work, want to work differently, at best know what they no longer want but do not know what they really want, know themselves too little, often feel alone with their problem, and that their wishes as well as their ability to wish are fragile and not strongly developed, counseling first of all needs time. Its duration is not determined in advance, for example by a health insurance fund limiting the number of hours; rather, the duration is determined by the time needed for counseling.

Then we as counselors must enter into relationship with the guest, because our concern is precisely to overcome their “poverty of desire”, their “self-ignorance”, and, where applicable, their lack of aliveness. This means that the relationship between counselor and guest is shaped by goodwill and sympathy, warmth and attention, attentiveness and care, respect and recognition. These form the interpersonal foundation without which counseling in our sense would be doomed to fail from the outset.
Furthermore, what is needed is the benevolent eye for possibility, that is, for the guest’s calling; the rare art of listening, which is known to be the “soul of conversation”; and the ability to strike the other person’s tone or to connect with the language to which they are receptive. Conventional coaching and therapy often act, out of a misunderstood professionalism, with distance, coolness, detachment, inaccessibility, and “objectivity”. In this way they never reach the person themselves. But that is not their concern either. Their concern is to bring people back to “normality”; to bring them to the point where they “function” again. And for that it is not necessary to concern oneself with the person themselves.
The counselor must be familiar with “New Work” as a whole and be able to present it vividly to the guest when needed. The “calling” is embedded in, or is part of, an overall concept and can only be understood and followed in that context. By this I mean, on the one hand, the image of the human being in “New Work” and, on the other, its different forms of work: high-tech self-providing, community production, and part-time job.
Calling plays a special role for Bergmann – see here, among other places, the bottom of page 372 and the bottom of page 381 in his book – citation. But he also leaves no doubt about how difficult it can often be to help people toward it. It is therefore indispensable for the counselor to explain what calling is in many different ways, including by repeatedly presenting it in contrast to the job or to wage labor. Beyond that, the counselor should be able to ask the question of calling in many different ways, again and again, until the guest has “bitten”.

Presenting Possibilities in the “Space of Possibilities”

In our experience, the poverty of desire and self-ignorance are not overcome through introspection but through encounter with the world. Just as the person seeking counsel needs the other person, the counselor, in order to become clearer about themselves in conversation, they need “the world” just as much in order to find orientation, themselves, and finally their calling. This explains the importance of what we call “presenting possibilities”. Just as adolescents need a stimulating environment in order to develop themselves and their capacities and explore their interests, many adults need the same later on, especially when they lack professional orientation, when they have become resigned and indifferent, when they have lost sight of themselves through years of monotonous job work. Put differently: because many people see no perspective, that is, no possibilities, out of hopelessness, lack of interest, discouragement, boredom, and routine (“everything already exists”, “there is nothing left to do”, or “there is no place for me”), concrete counterpositions are needed. “New Work” offers a completely different view of the world and of life: namely, that they are full of possibilities, full of opportunities for development, full of ideas not yet realized, full of possible beginnings. In reality there is no shortage of possibilities, but an abundance, so that there is something for everyone.

The process is in principle the same from guest to guest; of course, however, it differs in the possibilities that are presented, since each guest is unique. In a first step, possibilities are presented in a still general and unspecific way, but in the course of orientation they become more and more specific. What matters is that “presenting possibilities” does not take place only “theoretically” in conversation or through information, but very concretely and practically. Whatever possibility comes into question must be “visible”, must be “real”, and must be “tangible”. The possibility must be prepared in such a way that the guest can imagine taking it up. Bergmann therefore imagines an infrastructure in which this can be implemented – the “space of possibilities”. Frithjof Bergmann gives examples of this in his book.
• Mass production and mass consumption place a considerable burden on the environment; every ecological improvement of a product is neutralized by the increase in production demanded by economic growth; the globalization of the economy wants to spread the Western material lifestyle across the earth, which far exceeds its carrying capacity. Community Production, by contrast, is characterized by limitations of many different kinds that benefit the environment: it replaces industrial mass production with individual production; mass consumption gives way to individual need fulfillment; economic growth is a foreign word for Community Production. It is not the absurdly artificially inflated material lifestyle of the West, not its consumer frenzy, that is carried into the world, but a basic provision that can be individually shaped. Since Community Production is local economy, it decisively reduces the immense global transport of goods, which contributes substantially to environmental pollution. At the same time, it abolishes the now prevailing separation of life and work that spread with the economic and job system. This reduces the disastrous mass commuting to and from work worldwide, which also means less environmental pollution. Apart from that, thousands upon thousands of traffic jams are avoided in which we senselessly waste our time and nerves.

Experimenting

Experimenting complements “counseling” and the “space of possibilities”. All three elements stand in reciprocal relationship. What emerges in “counseling” and in the “space of possibilities” as a possible activity for the guest is tried out and tested in “experimenting”, so that the guest can experience whether they are on the right path. These experiences flow back into counseling.
People generally do not discover suddenly and all at once what they really, really want. Rather, it is often a long process with setbacks, trial and error, and reorientation. Only gradually does a calling emerge. Hence the necessity of “experimenting”. And each guest does this in their own way – whether in the form of internships, projects, excursions, participation in an existing program that interests them, and so on.
Like “presenting possibilities”, “experimenting” is an encounter with the world, a finding of oneself in the world. With regard to work: one experiences in a practical and concrete way which activity fits oneself.
Our prevailing work system (the job system) assumes that one remains in the profession one has learned; the highly developed division of labor makes a fundamental professional change difficult. Of course many people change positions over time, but only few change their profession. From many seminars with people who are dissatisfied with their job, we know how difficult it is, and how difficult it is made for them, to actually reorient themselves, especially if one wants more than a job.

Suppose Community Production were to prevail and the world’s population could be materially provided for by it sufficiently; suppose individually definable self-provisioning could be achieved with limited effort: the economy would no longer be an end in itself, but a means to an end. Concretely: its function would be to create the necessary condition for “free work”.


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10 Steps


Die 10 ersten Schritte





Reformation or revolution. Throwing everything that has existed so far overboard would be an understandable but probably exaggerated reaction, and therefore belongs among the less intelligent proposals for what now needs to be done. Nevertheless, the power and dominance of capitalist economic activity also need a strong and powerful response. One assumption of New Work New Culture is that the response could lie in withdrawal. More and more people are not only mentally saying goodbye to this way of living; they are putting on gloves in order to roll up their sleeves somewhere completely different. We need indignation and a Solidarność 2.0 that simply gets to work where politics looks away.

“We as the building people of the coming world”

New Work-New Culture is so groundbreaking and also means such comprehensive change in everything that one could spend a lifetime dealing with it. Not even Professor Frithjof Bergmann had the time and leisure to grasp every aspect of the new epoch of work into which we are entering. Precisely for that reason it makes sense not to wait until everything around New Work appears clear, logical, and structured enough, but simply to begin with New Work New Culture.

Work Matters – Wage Labor, Calling, Self-Provisioning

Changing work can be approached quite pragmatically. NWC offers three basic approaches for this: redesigning existing wage labor, redefining one’s personal attitude, or quite concretely becoming a prosumer. It does not have to be an entirely new job; it does not have to be a leap into cold water, although for some people that might do them good after years of routine. The model of the three pillars makes it possible to find one’s emphasis between different forms of work and to shift between them as needed, ultimately finding one’s own personal style of work and life.

Step 1 – Thinking About a Personal Alternative

One can enter wage labor at a solid, financially strong company or at an experimental start-up. One can look for work at a company such as Semco SA in Brazil, in a system where management functions without managers – that is, in a revolutionary, self-referential leadership model – or place oneself in the hands of a charismatic and trustworthy leader. Some would rather found a company on their own or work as a one-person enterprise in a “third existence”, collaborating with changing teams from project to project. What may be decisive is that one takes what one really, really wants seriously and also applies it to the other forms of one’s working life. If one gains the possibility of responding with one’s working time and, for example, becoming more independent of monetary remuneration by making things oneself, spaces open up in which one can explore how to find, sustainably, for oneself, for one’s family, for the employer and for society, a stable, meaningful, and healthy work system close to happiness.


New Work-New Culture Principles

* Work as little time as possible for fiat money.
* Work as much as possible on what you really, really want and what fulfills you.
* Work as much time as necessary in communal self-provisioning.

Thinking Work from Life – Fields of Action

Examples:

– Health – The health of the individual is strongly linked to their willingness to perform and their potential abilities.
– The question of meaning – We are burning the violins. The social compatibility of one’s own work; looking at the common-good balance sheet for oneself.
– Money&Value – relations of domination. Freeing oneself from one’s own limitations and from those of others. How and where do we see our value?
– Performance – Individual talent is more important than the concept of performance. When one passes through today’s job centers and the rituals of the modern economy, the performance demand is excessively determined by others and fundamentally wrong in its claim to be good for society. The concept is used against life, against aliveness. Thinking work from life means here: if performance is to be a principle at all, then it would have to be self-determined performance. Performance must be an experience that motivates me because I notice that it is good for me, because it is exciting, alive, inspiring. In the present system, the diversity of the definition of performance is reduced, and with it the intelligence in the system. With the concept of performance we can once again develop strength, develop energy, create an ecosystem of talents. What do I nourish myself from? That is the central question one has to ask, and what can I do to take a courageous step?

Examples of Obstacles:
– Change often means fear and worry. In principle, this is all right. It lives in human beings as an important aid to orientation. But often it blocks us in completely illogical ways. That is why irrationality has to be reduced in processes of change. Change triggers emotions that are not necessarily rationally anchored and can therefore be difficult to justify. Often they are archaic patterns that well up from our self-understanding like demons. What are these demons, where do they come from, and how are they programmed into us? It is about reducing loss of control and learned helplessness.


Orthoprada, Thomas Schneider - Vienna Biennale


Steps 2-10 for Thinking Work from Life

(After Harald Welzer)
2. Finally trust your feeling that a grand theater of illusion is taking place around you. The scenery simulates stability, but the play is a farce: again and again fat men appear and shout “growth!”, speculators play country dominoes, and number girls keep dancing across the stage with images of catastrophe. The audience is annoyed and angry, yet remains seated until the end of the performance. But: when will that come?
3. Better leave the performance and begin asking very simple questions. For example: why do people have to work more and more when they are already working more and more? Why do debts grow larger when more and more is being saved? Why does everything else shrink when the economy grows?
4. Look for answers together with your friends. For example: because all the idiots are working more too. Because the savings wander into other people’s pockets. Because many listed companies form parallel societies remote from the state.
5. Decide from now on not to participate anymore if your answers trouble you.

6. Begin by stopping. Stop believing European politicians. Stop believing economic research institutes all the more. And, for God’s sake, stop allowing yourself to be told without objection that any decision was without alternative. There is no such thing in democracies.
7. If you have now reached the point where you no longer tolerate everything, use your room for action. You live in one of the richest countries on earth, perhaps you are even excellently educated, you enjoy life and think fairly well of yourself. Why the hell do you do the same thing every day and never anything different?


Festival Urbanize, Wien 2015

8. Your room for action? Simply look at what others are doing. There are incredibly good approaches and projects: energy cooperatives, neighborhood gardens, fair consumption, local currencies, great foundations, companies that refuse the compulsion to grow. Write more politically if you are a journalist. Research for a different future if you are in academia. Change the break-time topics if you work on the assembly line. Shop differently if you run a restaurant. Ask where the fish comes from when you go out to eat. Take an interest in the future of your pupils if you are a teacher. Merge with a kindergarten if you run a senior citizens’ home. Think of hellfire if you head one of the four large energy companies. Produce cradle to cradle if you own a factory. Risk something if you consider yourself intellectual.
9. Try to belong somewhere where you can proudly say: “We do this differently!” Find ideas more interesting than experience; do not live at the expense of others.
10. Form laboratories of the future and have fun doing it. Forget the “five minutes to midnight” chatter of the ecological movement and the talk of the “world community” and the necessity of global solutions. No one stood at your cradle and said in a hollow voice: “You have come to us to save the world!” It is completely enough if you begin to deal responsibly with your life, your loved ones, and your country. But please start right away ; ))

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New Culture Campus


New Culture Campus




Thinking school in entirely new dimensions

Where will tomorrow’s skilled people come from? Everyone who understands the world of New Work not merely as an experimental field, but as the reality of the future, must ask this question. The idea of the New Culture Campus describes an educational landscape that turns our understanding of school upside down.

In the major and important debates about New Work, one significant aspect is sometimes pushed into the background: the question of how preparation for it can begin as early and as holistically as possible. Until now, the youngest generation has hardly been included in the social upheaval currently underway with regard to a different world of work. It is the adults who are facing the transformation. They strive for agile organizations, flat hierarchies, more responsibility for the individual, and lifelong learning. Yet the necessary skills, technological knowledge, awareness of sustainability, and capacity for open cooperation are not given to school and university graduates as basic equipment. The idea of New Work therefore has to begin earlier – namely in education and in the values with which the following generations are to grow up.

The Campus of Longing

The idea of the New Culture Campus, born from philosopher and founder of the New Work movement Frithjof Bergmann, is a radical departure from today’s idea of school. In such an educational landscape, the process leads from daycare through primary school to university and the first steps of one’s own entrepreneurial activity. Instead of teaching and learning, the children’s and young people’s own experiences are at the center. They engage with art, technology, craft, and IT; they experience nature directly and develop a practical understanding of sustainability. „In the current classical school system, children are functionalized into performers chasing the best grades,“ explains Margret Rasfeld, whom Frithjof Bergmann brought on board for implementing the New Culture Campus project. „When people think of school, everyone is so stuck in old patterns that a revolution in education seems unthinkable. Instead, we work away at small improvements to the old system. That is why it is an important approach to first bring an idea like the New Culture Campus into the world so that it can be discussed.“ Margret Rasfeld, current managing director of the initiative „Schule im Aufbruch,“ has already gained experience as a school principal in setting transformative processes in motion. But New Culture Campus thinks beyond all the limits imposed by German school and curriculum obligations.

„Our New Culture Campus is still in the planning stage,“ explains Andy Mayer, friend and right hand of Frithjof Bergmann. „For the implementation of the project, we want to bundle the knowledge of several bright minds and use synergies from different directions.“ Another pioneer for the project is therefore Marcus Fink, managing director of the Kreisjugendring Münchner Land. He too criticizes the structures in which society and school move – faster, higher, further. He brings experience from extracurricular education and does not see the New Culture Campus as a distant utopia. „Since 2010, the Jugendbegegnungsstätte am Tower in Oberschleißheim has already been for youth work what the campus could become for education. A large site, workshops, proximity to nature, and technology. People interested in the idea can come to us and see how such a concept has already been implemented at least in parts. And if more and more people are convinced by the idea, realization can happen very quickly.“

The holistic education aimed for on the New Culture Campus equips learners with skills they will actually need in the world in which they will live. „Ninety-five percent of what children laboriously acquire in school today is forgotten,“ Margret Rasfeld makes clear. „We want to prepare them for a world of work that places the human being at the center, their potential, not the economy. With the new form of learning, they would have the chance to try things out and discover what suits them, what they burn for, what they want to carry into the world. They gain systems knowledge that opens up how everything is connected. And they learn meta-competencies, such as the ability to work in teams and the attitude that they are allowed to make mistakes.“ Marcus Fink adds: „It is no longer enough to memorize things in order to recall them in a world in which everything turns and changes every day.“

Transformation always begins with small steps. Similar approaches, though not with this degree of social radicality, have been pursued since 2017 by the learning center „Learnlife“ in Barcelona. Inspired by this approach, the campus „Life Hamburg“ is currently emerging. The project of mail-order heir Benjamin Otto aims to realize the vision of intergenerational learning.

For financing New Culture Campus sites, Margret Rasfeld can imagine a fund founded and maintained by companies, from which municipalities build such educational landscapes without any company being able to exert direct influence. However, it is not only funders who must be convinced by the revolutionary educational orientation for the new generation. There are the parents, whose advance trust such a school needs; the lawmakers, on whose approval such a far-reaching design depends; and the teachers, who will face entirely new challenges. „Of course, teacher training also has to change,“ explains Margret Rasfeld. „But we must not delay this too long. By 2030 we must have changed the world. The future does not wait for administration.“

INFO/LINKS

Jugendbegegnungsstätte am Tower

Learnlife Barcelona

Life Hamburg

Colearning Vienna


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Contacts – New Work New Culture


Get in touch with us!




There are various ways to get in touch with New Work New Culture. It depends on your interest in New Work:

Do you want an overview of what is happening right now? Then the Facebook group is the easiest way to make contact.

Or do you want to know when members of the NANK community can be heard speaking about Frithjof Bergmann? We publish the important dates here on the website.

Is it about direct contact with the press spokesperson? Then contact Andy Mayer.

Is it about content on New Work New Culture, the Bergmann archive, or exhibitions? Then Thomas Schneider and Harald Gründl are the right contacts. Depending on what you want to know, we have listed experts in New Work-New Culture on this page with their different focuses, whom you can contact with specific questions.

____

Texts on New Work after Bergmann

Nina McDonagh, Frithjof Bergmann , Günter Thoma, Thomas Staehelin, Thomas Schneider

General lecture / New Work New Culture

Günter Thoma, Thomas Staehelin, Franz Nahrada, Claus Seibt, Sebastian Becker, Thomas Schneider

____

Calling – what one really, really wants – the mentors

Christine Jung , Thomas Diener, Jörg Beger

OMA (Open Mentors Academy)
Since 2006, mentors have met annually in changing locations (Potsdam, Vienna, Osnabrück, Freiburg, Munich), working together on the connecting aspects of New Work-New Culture.

____

Community Production

Thomas Schneider lecture More punk, less hell, workshop, New Work socio-technology (generative production methods, AI, blockchain, cultural memes)

Blair Evans (Incite Focus Fablab),

Prof. Andy Gebhardt (University of Aachen)

____

Education

Katrin Steglich, lecture, workshop,

Florence Holzner, Colearning Vienna, lecture, workshop

Sebastian Becker, lecture, workshop, link to a lecture recording

Günter Thoma, lecturer, speaker

____

Social enterprises

Tom Zuljevic (Die Querdenker, Caritas, Pro Mente)

Gerd Neuner (Neue Arbeit Neue Kultur Kiel)

Walter Häcker (Genossenschaft Arbeit Zuerst) – sadly died in August 2020

____

Entrepreneurship

Prof. Günter Faltin, Thomas Schneider

____

Environment, mobility, housing, living, working

Claus Seibt, Thomas Schneider

____

Exhibitions / Social Design

Harald Gründl, Thomas Schneider

Places and regions with contacts

USA

NWNC | Ann Arbor, Frithjof Bergmann
NWNC | Detroit, Richard Feldmann/James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, Blair Evans/Incite Focus Fablab
NWNC | Madison, Mark Linsenmayer/The partially examined Life

CANADA

NWNC | Toronto, Ruth Spitzer/dorkenwald&spitzer

SOUTH AFRICA

NWNC | Johannesburg, Lerato Tahane

INDIA

NWNC | Mumbai, Anil Saldanha/Radical Ecological Democracy

GERMANY

NANK | Kiel, Gerd Neuner/Neue-Arbeit-Neue-Kultur-Verein Kiel
NANK | Stuttgart, Walter Häcker/Arbeit Zuerst Genossenschaft
NANK | Berlin, Thomas Staehelin /+ZONE KG, Frauke Hehl/Workstation, Babette Scurell/Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (originally Neue Arbeit Dessau eV.), Prof. Günter Faltin/Stiftung Entrepreneurship, Freie Universität Berlin
NANK | Neustrelitz, Katrin Steglich, Thomas Staehelin
NANK | Hannover, Christine Jung/Frei-Räume
NANK | Potsdam, Rosalind Honig/OMA Mentorenakademie
NANK | Hamburg, AK Lokale Ökonomie, Contraste magazine, networking alternative-economy projects across Germany
NANK | Wuppertal, Christine Nordmann/Bergische Region , Schnürsenkelfabrik-Startpunkt
NANK | Freiburg, Jörg Beger/Transition Town
NANK | Köln, Sozialistische Selbsthilfe Mühlheim
NANK | München, Sara Dorkenwald /dorkenwald&spitzer

AUSTRIA

NANK | Linz, Tabakfabrik/Koop Arbeit/Fair Markt – Tomislav Zuljevic, Thomas Schneider
NANK | Vienna Co:llaboratory/Thomas Schneider, Claus Seibt, global villages/Franz Nahrada, Florence Holzner/Colearning Wien/Markhof, Thomas Diener/FairWork
NANK | Vorchdorf, OTELO
NANK | Ottensheim, Elke Hinterndorfer/NANK OTELO
NANK | St. Leonhard, Tommy Zuljevic/Wohneinrichtung OASE
NANK | St. Veit, Martin Maitz/Institut für Zukunftskompetenzen
NANK | Schlierbach/SPES Zukunftsakademie
NANK | Innsbruck, Manfred Blachfellner/change the game

Further people and NANK locations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on a map

Groups on the web

Official NANK Facebook group with about 1,300 members

Collaboration and the innovations that organize it shape the lifestyle of an entire generation. In order to find forms of new cooperation, the framework in which the working world is ordered is increasingly changing. This is reflected not only in new spaces and the changing infrastructure of work in large companies, but also in the new cultural techniques of the diverse ventures of entrepreneurs, which are now growing strongly far beyond the urban context.

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New Work New Culture Networks


newwork-newculture.networks




The New Work-New Culture philosophy now blows through entire towns, regions, countries, and continents, and manifests itself in NANK centers, NANK associations, small enclaves, workshops, and a loosely connected global community.

Over the years, NANK has initiated or co-organized many centers and project initiatives. The central question has always been how people can be strengthened through work and thus arrive in a new culture and in more freedom. Many people who have no opportunity to visit one of these nodes of New Work ask themselves: where can I concretely take something from?
NANK is a globally active social think tank, and the NANK community consists not only of places; many individual NANK people are active in associations or try to make a difference where they live, improving their work situation and livelihood in the spirit of Frithjof Bergmann. New Work includes topics such as sustainable mobility, high-tech DIY, gardening and farming, green professions, work organization, social enterprises, commons, and distributed ledger technology. Many companions of Frithjof Bergmann are engaged precisely in these fields.

Mottos such as „away from consumption“ and „pressure out, desire in“ give rise to many initiatives: artist collectives, food co-ops, urban-farming initiatives, exchange circles, and craft markets that work quietly in individual neighborhoods and rural communities. Bergmann’s ideas are implemented there in whole or in part, critically questioned, tested a great deal, and sometimes discarded again. In the best sense, NANK is an emancipatory movement that everyone can walk in their own way. Many young people experience „small“ again as very „beautiful,“ and also rediscover the connection of hand and head.

New forms of work for more freedom and resilience

Craft is experiencing a revival. Linked with mixed forms of social design, social sculptures around living and working, creative districts, building groups, and coworking, new societies are emerging everywhere. A new lifestyle with its own flair has been born. Being able to help shape one’s own working conditions is becoming increasingly important to many young people, and in doing so they are developing a very professional and responsible culture that is by no means apolitical.

Locations, associations, people

Collaboration and the innovations that organize it shape the lifestyle of an entire generation. In order to find forms of new cooperation, the framework in which the working world is ordered is increasingly changing. This is reflected not only in new spaces and the changing infrastructure of work in large companies, but also in the new cultural techniques of the diverse ventures of entrepreneurs, which are now growing strongly far beyond the urban context. Below we have listed the projects, places, and people in which New Work-New Culture has participated and which currently (2020) invite people to join in.

USA

NWNC | Ann Arbor, Frithjof Bergmann
NWNC | Detroit, Richard Feldmann/James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, Blair Evans/Incite Focus Fablab
NWNC | Madison, Mark Linsenmayer/The partially examined Life

CANADA

NWNC | Toronto, Ruth Spitzer/dorkenwald&spitzer

SOUTH AFRICA

NWNC | Johannesburg, Lerato Tahane

INDIA

NWNC | Mumbai, Anil Saldanha/Radical Ecological Democracy

GERMANY

NANK | Kiel, Gerd Neuner/Neue-Arbeit-Neue-Kultur-Verein Kiel
NANK | Stuttgart, Walter Häcker/Arbeit Zuerst Genossenschaft
NANK | Berlin, Thomas Staehelin /+ZONE KG, Frauke Hehl/Workstation, Babette Scurell/Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (originally Neue Arbeit Dessau eV.), Prof. Günter Faltin/Stiftung Entrepreneurship, Freie Universität Berlin
NANK | Neustrelitz, Katrin Steglich, Thomas Staehelin
NANK | Hannover, Christine Jung/Frei-Räume
NANK | Potsdam, Rosalind Honig/OMA Mentorenakademie
NANK | Hamburg, AK Lokale Ökonomie, Contraste magazine, networking alternative-economy projects across Germany
NANK | Wuppertal, Christine Nordmann/Bergische Region , Schnürsenkelfabrik-Startpunkt
NANK | Freiburg, Jörg Beger/Transition Town
NANK | Köln, Sozialistische Selbsthilfe Mühlheim
NANK | München, Sara Dorkenwald /dorkenwald&spitzer

AUSTRIA

NANK | Linz, Tabakfabrik/Koop Arbeit/Fair Markt – Tomislav Zuljevic, Thomas Schneider
NANK | Vienna Co:llaboratory/Thomas Schneider, Claus Seibt, global villages/Franz Nahrada, Florence Holzner/Colearning Wien/Markhof, Thomas Diener/FairWork
NANK | Vorchdorf, OTELO
NANK | Ottensheim, Elke Hinterndorfer/NANK OTELO
NANK | St. Leonhard, Tommy Zuljevic/Wohneinrichtung OASE
NANK | St. Veit, Martin Maitz/Institut für Zukunftskompetenzen
NANK | Schlierbach/SPES Zukunftsakademie
NANK | Innsbruck, Manfred Blachfellner/change the game

Further people and NANK locations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on a map

PARK – a prototype for New Work was an initiative with young Viennese architects in the summer of 2017. How can we use the predicted transformation in the world of work for new forms of working together and living together? In the summer of 2017, Team Vienna pursued this question with the temporary and participatory spatial installation PARK, transforming the parking lot at the edge of Vienna’s Naschmarkt into a public experiment. For four weeks, the wooden structure with its work infrastructures was open to all city residents for collaborative programming. The process concluded with the symposium New Work – New Social Housing. You can read the results of the experiment here.

Groups on the web

Official NANK Facebook group with about 1,300 members

Collaboration and the innovations that organize it shape the lifestyle of an entire generation. In order to find forms of new cooperation, the framework in which the working world is ordered is increasingly changing. This is reflected not only in new spaces and the changing infrastructure of work in large companies, but also in the new cultural techniques of the diverse ventures of entrepreneurs, which are now growing strongly far beyond the urban context.

Below we have listed the projects, places, and people in which New Work New Culture has participated and which currently (2020) exist.

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New Work Projects


Projects Overview




`NWNC / New Work New Culture` is a social think tank around Frithjof Bergmann that has spent 40 years intensively engaging with social transformation and its effects on work, economy, and culture. The New Work concept of work philosopher and anthropologist Prof. Bergmann places the human being at the center of this inquiry and explores how one could work much more on what one really, really wants. Since then, the implementation of more freedom at work has been tested and evaluated in countless projects. In essence, all these projects dealt with an economic alternative to the existing economy. An alternative as an ascent – technologically smart, ecologically sustainable, and humane.




New Factory

Today we are able to take concrete first steps toward a decentralized, socially just, and ecologically compatible mode of production. The latest computer-supported organization and manufacturing technologies play a role here, as do traditional craft skills and a creative culture of repair and reuse. Building a network of local centers of community production forms the backbone of an increasingly regionally oriented economy that is less vulnerable to crises, resource-conserving, democratic, and integrative.

„The normal factory could be one hundredth as large as it is now; it would fit into a bedroom if only we decided to do it.“ Frithjof Bergmann

NWNC Center

In practice, New Work has from the beginning in the late seventies sought places where the new organization of work can be tested and communicated. There are two things these centers of New Work, New Culture – such as Tabakfabrik Linz – do for our consciousness and everyday life:

1. Professional support in finding out what one really wants – calling.
2. Advanced do-it-yourself technologies; to see, touch, and apply.

Community Production

Community Production, or product economy, is at first glance an aspect of New Work that is difficult to grasp. Essentially, it is a convergence of technologies and a principle of cooperation. The way we go about organizing it becomes visible in part in the open-source world or in good Web 2.0 concepts such as blockchain: people, communities, entire villages entering into virtual collaboration. Examples such as digital bohemia, cultural industries, the free software movement, Wikipedia, OpenDesign, OpenSourceEcology, and OpenInnovation show that real social power can emerge through the addition and multiplication of the competences of direct producers.

With advancing digitalization, New Work has again gained fundamental relevance and is being put into practice worldwide by people seeking alternatives in the face of the increasing erosion of gainful employment and industrial society. New Work today wants to create an existential alternative for people to what they have long ceased to want: uncontrolled economic growth that asks neither about meaning nor about the prosperity of the people subjected to it.

New Work nevertheless remains entrepreneurial. But it wants to bring about a cultural transformation and generate strengthening and gain for people that is based less on capitalist profit than on a gain in time, quality of life, and long-term security. By using the latest technologies, it shifts human activity out of monomegastructures back into the local and regional sphere, and also into the sphere of self-directed work. Important terms for this emerging new, decentralized production are Community Production, commons, and technologies such as blockchain and AI.



When the term belonging is used in the field of work, it refers to the temporal dimension through which one is incorporated into an institution, no longer to the people who stand above one. When teamwork is discussed in wage labor, Gideon Kunda writes that it is about „exerting pressure in order not to become too dependent on one another, not to promote too much interaction, but merely to wear a mask of sociability.“ The famous Microsoft model – three teams write code and compete against each other – is only one of the worst excesses of these „winner takes all“ markets. It has been found that such arrangements do not increase belonging; on the contrary, people who work in this way try somehow to survive in the system and seek other networks for belonging. In systems of competitive pressure, belonging means exploitation. If we want to take belonging seriously, we must free ourselves from these dependencies and understand that belonging has much to do with talking with one another and listening to one another, and that this is the space in which trust-building transformation can take place.



Consumption and psychological self-determination

The nature of economic value itself is undergoing a mutation: in the past, goods had to have an intrinsic value in order to be sold on the market. Now, by contrast, value is latent in the experience of each individual and can only be realized when the individual’s appetite, the individual’s longing, is addressed and satisfied by the product.
The industrial business model today encounters a social structure increasingly shaped by the new individual, who wants something quite different. It is easy to get a toaster or a car. The costs of these goods have fallen. Why? On the one hand, because automation and logistical perfection have made them cheaper to produce and distribute than ever before; on the other hand, because they no longer have the value for us that they once had. Rather than consumer goods, we would dig deeper into our pockets for resources that allow us to live the way we want to live. Yet such products and services that satisfy difficult-to-fulfill desires are hardly offered. That is the collision.

Project list on Dorfwiki with an overview of numerous earlier projects

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The New Book: An Overview

The New Book. An Overview

The „job system“ for organizing work has existed for only about 200 years – since the Industrial Revolution. Always problematic, it is now approaching collapse, and what follows, for better or worse, depends on the decisions made and carried out in the present. Many people are dismayed and turn to political opportunists for help. Faced with the looming catastrophe, Frithjof Bergmann began developing alternatives to the work system in the 1970s. In Flint, Michigan, he began fostering dialogue among auto workers and the community about mitigating the effects of layoffs during recessions. What developed over the years is his proposed alternative to the job system. New Work, New Culture tells the development of his ideas and describes a path humanity could take so that everyone can lead a better life.


Work We Want, and a Culture That Strengthens Us







The German edition of the book
was published by Arbor Verlag in 2004.



New Work is an ascent

New Work is an ascent, an emergence through the intelligent and imaginative use of a series of astonishingly innovative technologies, some extremely simple while others go far beyond the state of computers. What these technologies have in common is that they are small and small-scale. They no longer require giant factories with long rows of huge machines demanding shiploads of capital. Instead, they can be gathered in a neighborhood, a village, or a community center. In short, one of the spaces of New Work is the transformation from industrial to communal production in small spaces. The result is the founding of new enterprises, but gradually also the increasing local production of food, housing, and energy, as well as furniture, devices, and clothing.

Basic Economy

The foundation of this new economy is a new work system, on which a new lifestyle and a new culture can be developed. One may continue working 10 hours per week in the old wage system or in one’s own classic enterprise, which is only gradually converted to the strategies of New Work. Another 10 hours are used with radically innovative small-space technologies that can replace industrial technologies in many things. Third, one does what one really, really wants, and that is what truly gives vitality and strength.

The goals of New Work are:

The alleviation and eventually the elimination of poverty in all countries everywhere. This cannot be achieved through increasingly desperate efforts to create more jobs. But it can be achieved through the further development and slow global spread of the new economy of community production.

A decisive reduction of physically and mentally paralyzing work;

The destruction of the „Four Tsunamis“;

The tsunamis:

a) the „butcher split“ between incredible wealth and terrible poverty;

b) the waste of our natural resources;

c) the destruction of our climate;

d) the destruction of our culture.

All four tsunamis were caused by the decimation, degradation, and devaluation of work, essentially brought about by three monster-sized causes: (a) automation, (b) globalization, and (c) worldwide migration from rural areas into the slums. Until now, the only answer to the ever-growing shortage of jobs has been the frantic escalation of economic growth. New Work brings more and more work to work: the work of community production for New Work prevents the compulsive gallop race for economic growth. For once, we have an abundance of work, and with these two additions this would also be the case, so that economic growth would no longer be a deadly race.

The fourth goal of New Work is the ascent to a new culture. This is the kindergarten in which we learn how to develop a new kind of school, based on these new forms of social relationships and an entirely new politics. The New Culture therefore wants to be more intelligent (far less wasteful), more humane (with less poverty than we have now), and therefore more joyful (for many who are ready to do their calling). At its peak, this culture wants to be more extravagant, which means more Shakespeare.

What could the work of the future look like?

After decades of practice, Frithjof Bergmann now presents the English-language foundational work on these new perspectives for the working society.

We suffer not only from disappearing jobs, but above all from the „poverty of desire.“ This means the inability to express wishes and realize one’s own projects. Not least for this reason, we cling to jobs that secure not only our livelihood but also our place in society – even when they are unsatisfying. And we despair excessively when we lose them.
To remedy this, we must focus more on what we „really, really want“ and find diverse and creative strategies for implementation. Frithjof Bergmann describes how this can succeed for the first time in the book presented here.

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What Is New Work


Manifest




New Work is an ascent – an uprising – through the intelligent and imaginative use of a flood of surprisingly innovative technologies, some of which are very simple while others are miles ahead of today’s computers.

What these technologies have in common is that they can be applied on a small scale in small spaces. They no longer require gigantic factory halls with long rows of enormous machines demanding shiploads of capital.

Instead, they can be brought together in a neighborhood, a village, or a community center.

In short, one half of New Work consists in the transformation from industrial production to community production in smaller spaces.

The result will not only be the founding of new enterprises, but also the growing increase of local production of food, housing, and energy, as well as clothing, furniture, household appliances, and beyond that the creation of even more of what is needed for a pleasant, modern, and fulfilled life.

The founding of this new economic form is the foundation on which a new system of work and ultimately a new way of life and culture can emerge.

Instead of being confined to an increasingly questionable mode of work, namely jobs, a growing number of people will spend about 10 hours per week in community production. Another 10 hours they will work in one of the new enterprises that use the radically innovative technologies mentioned above, replacing the industrial technologies of the past.

And third, they will do the truly New Work that does not drain people, but gives them vitality and strength: meaningful work that gives people the conviction of a truly lived life, work they experience as their calling.

That is why the goals of New Work are

The alleviation and eventual eradication of poverty in all countries, in every corner.
This cannot be achieved through ever more desperate efforts to create more jobs, but through the further development and slow global spread of the new economic form of community production.

A decisive reduction in the amount of work that paralyzes body and mind, and an enormous increase in seriously chosen work that strengthens body and mind and promotes consciousness.

Containing the „Four Tsunamis“

the „battle split“ between incredible wealth and murderous poverty

the waste of our natural resources

the destruction of our climate

the destruction of our culture

Automation

Underlying all four tsunamis is the decimation, degradation, and devaluation of work caused by three gigantic monsters, namely

automation

globalization and

the worldwide flight from the countryside into the slums of the big cities

Until now, the only answer to the ever-growing shortage of jobs has been the sick escalation of the demand for economic growth.

New Work stops this increasingly catastrophic shortage of jobs by adding two new forms of work to the job-work of the past:

work in community production and

deeply desired, truly chosen work

through which New Work avoids the compulsive gallop race for economic growth.

For once we have an abundance of work, and with these two additions we would have achieved that economic growth is no longer tied to a deadly driven race. Ending this race would in turn also stop the four tsunamis.

The fourth goal of New Work is the ascent toward a new culture.

This will require the development of a series of new institutions: from completely differently designed kindergartens, to schools that have nothing in common with today’s schools, to new forms of architecture and urban life. On the basis of newly created values, new human relationships, new social configurations, and an entirely new politics will emerge.

This new culture will be much more intelligent (far less wasteful), much more humane (with substantially less poverty than today), and also more joyful (because many more people will do work they really want to do – ideally even their calling).

At its peak this culture will also be rather extravagant – meaning more Shakespearean – a culture in which anger like King Lear’s, jealousy like Othello’s, and love like Juliet’s can exist.

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