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New Work Unfiltered: Why We Must Recover the Original

Since Frithjof Bergmann’s death more than four years ago, things have grown quiet around “New Work”, his concept for a comprehensive redesign of the work system. All the louder, however, have become those who simply appropriated the term and continue to bend it to their own purposes. First among them is the mainstream of New Work, which does refer to Bergmann but has something entirely different in mind, so that there are no longer any points of contact between the original and the mainstream.

Frithjof Bergmann repeatedly emphasized that New Work is a many-sided and comprehensive approach that cannot be pressed into a definition or – which amounts to the same thing – reduced to one dimension. New Work is, among other things: a critique of the prevailing work system (job system) and its many deficiencies. It makes clear how burdensome the conditions have become under which people have to work. The formulation of a new work system in order to overcome the irreversible abuses of the job system.

In doing so, New Work introduces new forms of work on both sides of the labor market and beyond it, in order to reduce dependence on the job system as far as possible and to significantly improve the quality of work. A critique of the prevailing economic system. It demonstrates that this system is not sustainable. In particular, infinite economic growth in a finite world is a contradiction that creates more and more conflicts. A contribution to post-growth economics. For New Work shows how we can free ourselves from the compulsion toward economic growth. Sustainable economic activity. The concept stands for good and healthy work, for local production that is climate-friendly and conserves resources, and the modern self-provisioning envisioned in the concept is a remedy against the mentality of consumption and disposability.



The question of technology: What role should technology play in our society in the future? Who should have access to it? And how can it be used for the benefit of society as a whole?

Both a concept for the societal level and a guide for individuals. The individual can begin to shape their work in the spirit of New Work without having to wait for labor-market reforms from above. NWNC is a flexible concept that each person can adapt to their own possibilities and needs. It is a concept applicable worldwide, one that does justice to the globalization of work and the economy.

The formulation of the claim to usher in a new culture in which the economy and work should serve human beings and their development. In Bergmann’s words: “The goal of New Work is not to free people from work, but to transform work in such a way that it brings forth free, self-determined, human beings. We should not serve work; work should serve us. The work we do should not consume all our strength and exhaust us. Instead, it should give us more strength and energy. It should support us in our development, helping us become more alive, more complete, stronger human beings.” (Frithjof Bergmann and Stella Friedland, Neue Arbeit kompakt, Arbor Verlag, Freiamt 2007, p. 16)

With this article series we want to recall the original concept and its many layers by devoting each contribution to one aspect of New Work. We do not claim completeness; rather, further texts will be added over time. The authors are guides, companions, members of the network of the same name, and people who engage with Bergmann’s world of thought and his concerns. Bergmann later renamed his concept “New Work-New Culture”, among other reasons to distinguish it from the emerging mainstream. In this article series we consistently speak of “New Work” in order to point out that the term originally goes back to him and not to abandon it to the mainstream.

New Work as a Critique of the Work System

New Work is first of all a detailed critique of the prevailing work system. If there were nothing to object to in it, thinking about alternatives would seem unnecessary. But precisely the opposite is the case. 1

Deficiencies and Abuses in the Prevailing Work System

The work system (also called the job system or wage-labor system) only emerged with industrialization and brought abuses with it from the very beginning. These changed over time: old ones disappeared, new ones appeared, working conditions improved or worsened (and the situation differs from country to country). What remains decisive, however, is this: the deficiencies and abuses continue; only their appearance changes. Critique must therefore be renewed regularly. Which adversities currently make working life in Germany especially difficult for people and have a negative effect on them?

Performance Pressure

Performance is defined as the relation of work to time – and this relation is optimized in the sense that more work has to be done per unit of time than before. If this is the case, two things happen: first, the performance aspect of work moves more and more into the foreground. This means, on the one hand, that work is transformed into performance and the work society into a performance society. And, on the other hand, we come under performance pressure the more performance we have to deliver. This idea of performance is omnipresent in the world of work and can in principle affect all employees.

Time Pressure

Time pressure arises as a consequence of increased performance, because one has less and less time per topic, per matter, per project, per customer, and so on, and therefore comes under pressure to nevertheless finish on time and deliver the expected results.

Pressure to Succeed

Success has developed into the central category in working life. Success is the altar to which people sacrifice and on which they are sacrificed. One problem with success, however, is that it does not satisfy; it makes people hungry – hungry for more success. Goals, plan figures, targets, and expectations are ratcheted upward. This leads to pressure to succeed – and to powerlessness, because success depends not only on one’s own effort but also on external factors over which one has no influence.

Overwork

Overtime is a constant phenomenon in the German world of work. According to the Federal Statistical Office, 1.3 billion hours of overtime were worked in 2023.2 It is another means of using human labor power optimally, but at the same time also of exhausting it.

Meaningless Jobs

These are jobs that nobody really needs and that produce no added value or social benefit. They are jobs whose holders themselves know that they are engaged in meaningless employment. For that reason these jobs also have no meaning for them. People keep the job because it earns them money and because they see no alternative. These jobs can be found in all sectors. The scholar and activist David Graeber called them bullshit jobs. Drastic, but correct. These jobs suggest that they are useful, valuable work, which in reality is not the case at all. Their disappearance would not be noticed. 3

Joblessness

Joblessness is a constant companion in the job system. Even now: despite a favorable labor-market situation, we have more than two million job seekers. The next recession or wave of automation will certainly come, and then there will be even more.

Precarious Employment

These are poorly paid jobs that are easy to terminate and often fixed-term. They also include agency work and temporary work as well as marginal employment.

Precarious employment also includes those seemingly secure full-time jobs that are threatened by joblessness – whether through the globalization of work, the rationalization of work, or the restructuring of work, which often leads to staff reductions and outsourcing.

Understaffing

More and more sectors suffer from acute staff shortages (almost every truck driving in front of you says: “colleague wanted”). The reasons are, as always, manifold, but they are rooted in a dysfunctional job system. The vacancies exist even though there are also job seekers who cannot find a job. This mismatch problem shows that the labor market does not fulfill its most basic task: bringing supply and demand together. Part of the problem is homemade: for many years, experienced employees were sent into early retirement by the tens of thousands – and they are missing now.

Be that as it may: understaffing leads to a greater workload for employees, because the existing work is distributed over fewer shoulders, which causes stress, so employees then become ill or leave, which in turn places an even greater burden on those who remain.

The Job Dominates Life

We do nothing more in our lives than work: eight hours a day, forty hours a week. But that is not all. The job reaches deep into the rest of our lives:

Overtime accumulates and extends the working day.

The daily trips to work and back cost time and money. This commuting is increasing overall: from one city to another; from the countryside to the city; from east to west.

Then we must add the time required for qualification and further-training measures.

Those who finally finish work not seldom take work home with them – whether literally or figuratively.

One consequence of this is that other contents of life cannot be integrated alongside the job, or cannot be integrated adequately. Conflicts arise in reconciling work and life.

Job Work Is a Means and Not an End

At its core, job work means exchanging labor power for payment. It is therefore essentially a means – for the employee, a means of earning money in order to secure a livelihood. With job work, the human being remains bound to the necessity of securing their material basis of life. In this respect, job work is necessary work and not free work. For the employer, in turn, it is a means of achieving the organization’s goals with human labor power.

Effects of the Abuses

These and other abuses have a negative effect on people. The extent to which job work now harms people can be measured by the following developments:

Dissatisfaction with the job is increasing. According to surveys, the “number of employees without emotional attachment in Germany is at its highest level since 2012”. According to the Gallup survey, it is almost 20 percent.4

The list of work-related impairments is getting longer and longer: states of exhaustion and fatigue, lack of energy and dejection, nervousness and headaches are among them, to name only a few.

Illnesses such as back problems and high blood pressure are spreading and are on the way to becoming widespread diseases.

Regarding the increase in mental illnesses, the health-insurance statistics are unambiguous.

For this abundance of abuses and their grave effects on human beings, Bergmann coined the term “pathology of the wage-labor system”. 5

How do these abuses arise? There are several explanatory approaches. Let us take joblessness as an example.

Joblessness is closely connected with the current work system. Historically, before the job system there was subsistence economy, in which self-provisioning dominated. For the self-provisioning society, joblessness was an unknown concept. The self-provider was dependent neither on a labor market nor on an employer; no one could dismiss them, because they were self-sufficient. By contrast, we officially and literally call the job holder a “dependent employee”. That means whether a person keeps their workplace or not, whether they find one or not, is fundamentally not up to them. Let us therefore state clearly: joblessness or unemployment is a symptom of the current work system.

Our work system (the labor market) functions like a bottleneck. It lets only job work pass through. Formulated as a contrast: work as such is unlimited, while jobs are limited, especially secure and well-paid ones. We have therefore not only made ourselves dependent on the job system; we must constantly make efforts to preserve and create jobs in order to counteract job scarcity – or, as it is often so nicely put: we must prevent or combat joblessness.

Now the job system is coming under pressure: declining economic growth, increasing international competition, and refugee movements are already troubling it. Yet nothing is as threatening to the employment system as the technologization of work, which receives an enormous push through “digitalization”. It makes it possible to systematically replace human labor power with technological labor power. Consequently, far more jobs will be automated than newly created. Frithjof Bergmann recognized this danger early, as did many before and after him. Representative here is the study by Frey and Osborne: “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”6 But beyond this, Bergmann saw like no one else that technological development is Janus-faced – it contains enormous dangers, but also opportunities: “The new technologies are coming toward us like a great wave: if we do not move from the spot, it can bury us; but if we move with skill, this wave could lift us higher than ever before.”7 Bergmann warns against leaving technological development to itself or to its current beneficiaries. Society must think about and decide which technology we want and, above all, how it can be placed in the service of all people. For this reason, technology plays an extraordinarily important role in the concept of “New Work” – see the article “New Work as a New Work System”.

A principal explanation for the existence of many deficiencies and abuses follows from the fact that work is a means for producing goods and services. In business administration, work counts as a production factor. It is therefore subjected to production conditions and organized according to economic criteria such as efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness. The economization of work is a constant process and currently takes place under headings such as flexibilization of work, agile work, flat hierarchies, management by objectives, teamwork, and so on. What is decisive is this: work is oriented toward the needs of the organization or employer and not toward the individual needs of the human being. The deficiencies and abuses that result are deficiencies and abuses for the working person, not for the organization. For example, the employee must meet increasing performance demands; if this becomes noticeable for them as performance pressure and then affects their health, they become stressed and ill, but not the organization.

Conclusion

We have established a work system that human beings are expected to serve and that burdens them increasingly. Why do people put up with this? Why do they not rebel? One important reason is that they are dependent on the job system. The job secures income, livelihood, material security, acquisition of pension entitlements, health insurance, unemployment insurance, social status, and so on. The other decisive reason is that they have no alternative. New Work has therefore made it its task to be this alternative.

1 In his book “New Work-New Culture”, Bergmann devotes an entire chapter to this critique: The Wage-Labor System (pp. 79 to 120).

2 https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2024-05/arbeitszeit-ueberstunden-beschaeftigte-milliarden-stunden-deutschland

3 David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Simon & Schuster, 2018.

4 https://www.gallup.com/de/472028/bericht-zum-engagement-index-deutschland-2023.aspx

5 See Bergmann, p. 83f.

6 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271523899_The_Future_of_Employment_How_Susceptible_Are_Jobs_to_Computerisation

7 Politische Ökologie, Oekom Verlag, Munich, May/June 1998 issue, p. 55.

Keywords:

New Work, Frithjof Bergmann, work system, job system, wage labor, work culture, critique of work, Neue Arbeit, post-growth economics, sustainable economic activity, performance pressure, joblessness, bullshit jobs, technologization, digitalization, self-provisioning, modern working world, work-life balance, job satisfaction, meaningful work

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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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Pathology


Pathologie des Job-Systems




The Crisis of Old Work

Why do we need an alternative to the job system? Why do we need “New Work”? One important answer is this: because “old work” is in crisis; because it is increasingly marked by deficiencies and abuses; because it suffers from many “illnesses” and in turn makes people ill. Frithjof Bergmann therefore calls his critique “a pathology of the job system”. What are these “illnesses”, or these “deficiencies and abuses”?

Joblessness
The most obvious deficiency is joblessness. It can happen to anyone – men and women, academics and craftspeople, old and young. Joblessness is not only a local, regional, or national phenomenon, but above all a global one. In view of global population growth and worldwide migration from the countryside into cities, the army of job seekers is growing without end. Labor is available in abundance.

At the same time, the job system is coming under pressure, because automation is receiving a tremendous push through digitalization: more and more human labor can be replaced by technological labor (machines, robots, automated systems, 3-D printers, and so on). This intensifies the chronic shortage of jobs.

Joblessness is often presented as the only deficiency of the job system, but it is by no means the only one. It is nothing other than the tip of the iceberg, most of which lies hidden below the surface.

Precarious Employment
The next serious abuse to name is precarious employment. These are poorly paid jobs that are easy to terminate and often limited in time. They also include agency work and temporary work, marginal employment, and in a broader sense business start-ups born out of necessity or embarrassment, from which people can barely make a living.

Precarious employment also includes those seemingly secure, permanent full-time jobs that are threatened by joblessness – whether through the globalization of work, the rationalization of work, or the restructuring of work, which often leads to staff reductions and outsourcing. For employees this means constant unrest and uncertainty about whether they will keep their jobs. This is currently visible in the discussion around Work 4.0, the “digitalization of the world of work”, where the assumption is that infinitely more jobs than before can be automated in the future. Frithjof Bergmann, incidentally, predicted this trend more than 30 years ago.

Overwork
Employees are working more and more overtime. In Germany alone, the number of overtime hours has now reached the billions. Mobile phones and laptops that people take home and carry everywhere mean that they are constantly reachable. They also blur the transitions between work and private life, meaning they are no longer as clearly separated as they once were.



Frithjof Bergmann zur „Nicht Krise“ des Systems



Frithjof Bergmann assumes that the job system is not merely in a crisis, but that we are at the beginning of a new epoch and need a radically new program for organizing work better.

Performance Pressure

The term must be taken quite precisely: we are speaking of performance pressure, not work pressure (just as we are no longer really a work society, but a performance society). We no longer pursue work; we deliver performance. How did this happen?

Work turns into performance when the aim is only to accomplish as much work as possible within a given unit of time (for example, eight hours a day). Performance is defined as a physical quantity – work divided by time. This ratio is constantly optimized through overtime, work intensification, and the acceleration of work processes. And the more it is optimized, the more we come under performance pressure.

One could also put it this way: the more we have to work, the more the idea of performance moves into the foreground. The more other aspects of work recede into the background. This idea of performance is omnipresent in the world of work and is not limited to human beings. To use a deliberately stark example: in agriculture, cows have long been expected to deliver more and more performance, meaning more and more milk. Increases of several hundred percent have occurred. Animals and humans alike suffer under performance pressure.

Closely connected with this is

Time Pressure

: the more performance has to be delivered in a given unit of time, the less time one has for each task. Take the example of a social worker in a youth welfare office: over the years, things have developed so that the social worker is expected to process more and more cases per day, leaving hardly any room to do justice to the individual case.

Pressure to Succeed

Success has become a decisive category: in society, in school, in parts of family life, and most of all in working life. Success is what counts. It is the altar to which people sacrifice and on which they are sacrificed. One problem with success is that it does not satisfy; it makes people hungry – hungry for more success. Goals, plan figures, expectations, and efficiency are constantly ratcheted upward. This creates pressure to succeed – and, incidentally, powerlessness, because success depends not only on one’s own effort but on many factors over which one has no influence.


Further Abuses in the Job System

• No prospects within the company
• incompetent superiors who lead to demotivation and inner resignation among employees (poor leadership style, lack of communication, no trust)
• bullying
• corporate cultures damaged by scandals (to name only companies such as Deutsche Bank, Bayer/Monsanto, or the VW Group shaken by Dieselgate)
• routine. On the one hand, routine allows us to do our work better and better, so it does not overwhelm us and we can carry it out “routinely”. On the other hand, routine leads to boredom, a lack of challenge, and a loss of imagination and creativity. Anyone who performs repetitive tasks for eight hours every day becomes passive.
• lack of room to shape one’s work
• unused potential that people want to realize but that the company does not call upon
• being caught in “working” and “consuming”, a cycle emptied of meaning
• other contents of life cannot be integrated sufficiently alongside the job, leading to conflicts in reconciling work and life – for example:
– reconciling family and work
– reconciling work and partnership
– reconciling work and caring for relatives
– reconciling work and voluntary engagement
• many people have to do work that is questionable, if not meaningless, and brings no real added value
• commuting: the number of commuters is constantly rising. From one city to another. From the countryside to the city. From east to west. Commuting costs time, nerves, and money.

The Job System Promises a Lot and Delivers Little:

• It promises professional identity and recognition, yet the “illnesses of the job system” make these impossible. Instead, insecurity, disappointment, inner resignation, the experience of replaceability, and fear for one’s job are the order of the day. Professional identity has already eroded in many cases.
• It promises full employment, but is characterized by the split between those who have a job and those who do not; those who have a secure and well-paid job and those who must make do with precarious employment.
• It promises general prosperity, yet increasingly deepens the gap between rich and poor (rich North – poor South; wealthy managers / moderately earning employees; people who own capital and multiply it while the income of those without means stagnates. A particular form of impoverishment arises through migration from countryside to city on a scale of millions. In the countryside, as a farmer, one could make a modest living through self-provisioning; now, as a migrant worker, one leads a precarious existence or ends up in the slums of the world, where one struggles to get by).

The Job System Entangles Itself in Contradictions:

• On the one hand, those who have a job work more and more; on the other hand, jobless people have nothing to do.
• On the one hand, meaningful work that needs to be done lies fallow; on the other hand, people who want to work lie fallow. Work and human beings do not come together.
• On the one hand, there are vacancies that cannot be filled; on the other hand, there are unemployed people looking for work and unable to find it.
• On the one hand, a great deal of “unnecessary”, “meaningless”, and “superfluous” work is done. Many jobs are degrading to human beings and their only added value consists in keeping people occupied so they have something to do and increasing the company’s profit. On the other hand, a great deal of meaningful, socially necessary work is waiting to be done.
• On the one hand, the job system is always marked by a shortage of jobs, so there are always jobless or underemployed people; on the other hand, the job system is incapable of organizing the infinite abundance of work that exists in itself. It is important to point this out: jobs are scarce, but work is not.

Let us draw a

conclusion:

The job system is haunted by “illnesses” from which many people suffer. Frithjof Bergmann calls the job itself a “mild illness”, meaning it does not kill us, but it constantly troubles us, makes us dissatisfied, drains us, takes our strength, exhausts and depresses us. In the long run, the job deforms and cripples us, so that not much of us as human beings remains when we retire. Like the anti-smoking campaign “Smoking endangers your health”, one would have to start a campaign saying: “The job endangers your health”.

Human beings have subordinated themselves to the job system. They serve it as a means for its purposes. The job system is not interested in them as human beings, in their real, deeper, most individual wishes, needs, gifts, and potentials. It has no interest in people developing through work into more self-confident, stronger, more independent, or more complete beings.

Human beings have made themselves dependent on the job system in many ways. Because this is so, and because we have no alternative work system, we need jobs or employment opportunities at any cost. In view of the fact that automation, digitalization, and the rationalization of work constantly destroy jobs, we absolutely need economic growth to compensate for the loss of jobs. We are therefore forced to depend on growth. Otherwise the number of unemployed people immediately shoots upward and leads to mass joblessness.

Finally, the question must be asked: what purpose does the prevailing job system actually serve? Does it not serve more than anything else:
• the social division between rich and poor, between job holders and the jobless?
• the enrichment of a few at the expense of many?
• the disciplining, control, subordination, dependency, and making-compliant of human beings?

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 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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Conversation Among Friends #1


Conversation Among Friends | Frithjof Bergmann and Gerd Neuner




Vol I – video



A conversation among friends – this is the motto under which the series begins with founding father and long-time companion Frithjof Bergmann. Also present:

Gerd Neuner & Michael Dolz

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Kitchen Conversations #1


Kitchen Conversations | Berit Glaser




Do less be more .- video



NWNC Kitchen Conversations:
On constructive laziness, guinea pigs, and worn underwear for Instagram.

A conversation by Ilja Weisz with Berit Glaser

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Berit Glaser

Waitress
Actress
Model
Set producer
Ghostwriter
Story One author
Social worker
Pole dancer

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Kitchen Conversations. A video blog about work.
NANK Co:llaboratory is a social think tank on work and has been dealing for 40 years with transforming the wage-labor system into something better.

I enjoy sitting at the kitchen table with friends. My thoughts seem, as a rule, to ignite only in conversations. Thinking together and thinking further together, including shared silence, expresses for me a participation in life that cannot be achieved alone.
Ilja



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We Miss You – Obituary for Frithjof Bergmann


Frithjof, wir vermissen Dich



Ariel Bergmann, Jandy Bergmann, Luke Bergmann

Frithjof Bergmann, professor emeritus of philosophy, and beloved father to Luke Bergmann, Jandy Bergmann and Ariel Sankar-Bergmann, died May 23 in Ann Arbor at the age of 90.

Born to a mother who was Jewish and a father who was a Lutheran pastor, Frithjof grew up in the Austrian Alps during the darkest days of WW II, and although he spent his life in reflection, he was always ambivalent about it being his profession.

His identity as a philosopher and professor — he studied with Walter Kaufman at Princeton and was a faculty member in the University of Michigan’s philosophy department for close to half a century — meant an enormous amount to him. But these were designations he often presented to his audiences and readership as if they were weighted garments that he somehow was able to overcome.

„Despite being a philosopher,“ he would say with a wry smile „I am trying to do something useful!“

It was in part a restlessness with the customs of academic philosophy that led Frithjof from his earliest writing on Hegel (whose work he, in any case, seemed forever to value most) to the aphorisms of Nietzsche and other existentialist philosophers who wrote novels and plays. His most conventional book of philosophy, “On Being Free,” published in 1977, is noted for its stunning brilliance and also for the fact that it has no footnotes.

It was more pointedly a sense of urgency in action, an understanding of the interplay of being and doing — „really doing something!“ he might say — that made Frithjof such an exquisite teacher, as evinced by many awards for his instruction and by countless testimonies from his students, who include some of the preeminent Continental philosophers of the last 50 years.

Robert Soloman, who as a student was so moved by Frithjof’s lectures on Nietzsche that he abandoned plans for a career in medicine and later became one of the best known philosophers in the US, insisted throughout his long career that Frithjof was the best teacher of philosophy anywhere.

Frithjof aimed not only to instruct but to move his students, out of a conviction that there was much to do, that the world could be made beautiful and humane, and that we should expect as much of ourselves. These were his hopes when he helped to organize the first teach-in during the war in Vietnam. And these were his hopes during the generational recession of the early 1980s. Frithjof threw himself into this catastrophe, emerging with a new way of thinking about jobs and human labor. He called this collection of ideas “New Work,” and in articulating it he drew from his whole breadth of experience — from reading Hegel to chopping firewood in frozen wintertime. He withdrew from academia in the decades following this commitment and traveled the globe to where work and quality of life were most perversely out of whack: Johannesburg and Soweto, Mumbai, among indigenous communities in British Columbia, and the impoverished neighborhoods of Detroit. Frithjof talked incessantly about “New Work.” He preached and proselytized. He damaged and even lost some relationships in the maelstrom of his global effort. But particularly over his last 10 years his work and life became more gratifying than ever before. He published his final book, “New Work New Culture” in 2019, and especially in Germany, “New Work” has become the foundation for a broadly adopted and celebrated set of intellectual, design and organizational efforts. In addition to his three children, Frithjof is survived by six grandchildren. For those who would like to make a gift in his memory, Frithjof’s family asks that they send donations to https://www.gofundme.com/f/frithjof-bergmann-memorial-service.