New Work New Culture deals with the mental change required in relation to work, and with the spaces this transformation needs. Imagine a space where people come together to learn more about what work can be, rather than what work must be. What would such a space require in order to become attractive? More community? Closer bonds between people? A stronger sense of belonging? Richard Sennett says that conventional wage and employment work now lacks precisely this feeling of belonging. The new economy is only one example. Managers at IBM change, on average, every year. Ordinary employees stay for an average of 3.6 years. When someone works long and hard on a larger project, there is an excellent chance that nobody will acknowledge their work. The last decades have further destabilized the small economy and the household economy.
„The power of wage labor over people, the waste of human abilities and creativity, must be ended as quickly as possible. This cannot be done through cosmetic corrections to the wage-labor system, such as ergonomic workplaces or union-negotiated breaks. The basic structures of the system must be changed.“
Frithjof Bergmann
Fulfillment Through Transformation – Finding Life Through Crisis
„Nothing is as important as enlivening, energizing, and strengthening people.“
Yet the wage-labor system does exactly the opposite. As an instrument of political and social power, wage labor drives the division of society. Through it, human beings are trapped in an economic and value system that is both sick and makes people sick. Bergmann calls this condition the pathology of wage labor and links it to a wide range of symptoms:
Wage labor weakens people, paralyzes them, and drains their life energy. It intensifies economic and social injustice. While some people are almost entirely left out, others suffer from overwork and exhaustion. Some enrich themselves disproportionately while others live in bitter poverty. Talents are not developed, and people cannot unfold freely. On the contrary: work resembles a mild illness. Because it occupies such a large part of our lives, this illness has a long-term deforming effect. We become dulled, discouraged, accustomed to boredom and passivity; we become submissive and dependent. Human beings are, quite literally, crippled.
„How should I live if I do not want to miss my life, but actually live it?“
This question is the key moment: the transition to New Work and, in a deeper sense, to a New Culture and a new life. As with rites of passage, the answer to this question is connected to a complex inner process. Because of the deforming effect of the wage-labor system, human beings have become unable to have desires – or, in the language of New Work, to really, really want something. Bergmann calls this a poverty of desire.
The aim of New Work is to overcome this lack and to place individual human need at the center. We should not serve work; work should serve us and give us strength and energy so that we become more alive, more complete, and stronger human beings.
„The work that I and you really and truly want helps you become who you are.“
Bergmann grounds this idea in a radically different system of thought and values. Human beings must turn around; they must transform themselves, and society with them. Instead of seeing work as a means of payment that subordinates people, work should become a tool through which the individual develops, rises to a higher level, and is drawn deeper into life.
The three-pillar model provides the basis for this. While partially continued wage labor and community work with high-tech self-providing form the economic and social frame, calling – the work we really, really want – is the central goal. From it will emerge the new vocations and the products we truly need, products that do not destroy the planet.
The path to New Work can almost be compared to a spiritual, holistic transformation: for the individual it is comprehensive and disruptive; it goes to the core and produces a new self. As a logical consequence, its endpoint can only be a newly lived culture.
Wage Labor
Many people need something to hold onto when navigating uncertainty. Employment in the job system still appears very attractive to most people. At the same time, more and more people want to reduce the share of time they must spend on it. Part-time work is advancing, as is partial entrepreneurship. The model of New Work – New Culture places will, meaning, independence, and creativity at the center. This applies to employees just as much as to the workplace itself: the possibility of developing within work and connecting one’s life with work in a nourishing way. Formerly strict workflows and top-down hierarchies are moving further into the background, because this change also requires a change in the workplace. New professions, new sociotechnical practices, and better arrangements of production emerge. Employees are included in decision-making processes; ideas are wanted. The New Work model is especially visible in startup cultures: young and innovative lateral thinkers who use the advantages of digitalization and draw on employees‘ potential. Companies become more diverse because a variety of knowledge, education, gender, language, and culture is needed. No matter where you come from and what you have done before, you can make a valuable contribution and help improve things.
Calling. Do What You Really, Really Want
Callings are activities that people really, really want to pursue. In them, people feel fully embodied; they act with devotion, intensity, and passion. Often these activities reveal their talents, enliven their values, and express their self-image. In them, people feel alive and inspired. The main goal of New Work is that everyone should live their calling for a meaningful part of life. Some people may have several callings, but everyone will have one if only the time is taken to discover and cultivate it.
Perhaps the most important element in finding one’s calling is the presence of places and people who support the search. To put New Work into practice, we need Centers for New Work. Each center will be unique, but they can be understood as a combination of school, meeting room, art and media center, and stage. Such a center can be designed from scratch or built within existing schools, churches, community centers, or abandoned factories. They are places of encounter where people receive the basic education needed to discover their own callings. They learn the diverse skills required for high-tech self-production and for the small-shop methods of community production. Spaces for HTEP and community production can be connected to such centers.
Eigenarbeit.
High Tech Self Providing
Community Production
Work that one really, really wants to do is not possible without a certain material, physical, and economic independence. With the help of high tech, however, most of the products needed for an attractive life can be produced by people themselves in just a few hours of work per week. This gives people the freedom to sustain themselves, so that they have time available to follow their callings. A wide range of such technologies and products has already been developed, including fabricators, biogenic techniques, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.
Community Production
Community production creates products that are easy to repair, complex, and durable. For community production we need more and more New Work centers with fab labs and community rooms for making new, meaningful products that people really need. The advantage lies in mutual support among the different skills of the individuals in the center, and in the exchange of knowledge while learning new sociotechnical methods of making. These processes strengthen community, and the products that emerge can be sold on the open market in order to provide the cash needed to purchase raw and operating materials.
Neue Arbeit Neue Kultur – Das Manifest
New Work is an ascent – an uprising – through the intelligent and imaginative use of a flood of surprisingly innovative technologies. Some are very simple, while others are miles ahead of today’s computers. What they have in common is that they can be applied on a small scale and in small spaces. They no longer require gigantic factory halls with long rows of huge machines and shiploads of capital.
Instead, they can be gathered 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 companies, but also a stronger increase in local production of food, housing, and energy, as well as clothing, furniture, household appliances, and much else that 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 limited to an increasingly questionable mode of work – the job – a growing number of people will work about ten hours per week in community production. Another ten hours will be spent 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 truly New Work: work that does not drain people but gives them vitality and strength; meaningful work that gives people the conviction of a life truly lived; work that they experience as their calling.
Therefore, the goals of New Work are:
1. The relief and eventual elimination of poverty in all countries, in every corner.
2. 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 raises consciousness.
The disaster of the „four tsunamis“:
- the battle split between unbelievable wealth and murderous poverty
- the waste of our natural resources
- the destruction of our climate
- the destruction of our culture
All four tsunamis are rooted in the decimation, degradation, and devaluation of work caused by three gigantic monsters:
- automation
- globalization
- the worldwide rural exodus into the slums of the big cities
So far, the only answer to the growing lack of jobs has been the sick escalation of demands for economic growth. New Work stops this increasingly catastrophic lack of jobs by adding two new forms of work to the job of the past:
- work in community production
- deeply desired, truly chosen work
In this way, New Work avoids the compulsive race for economic growth. Once we have an abundance of work, these two additions mean that economic growth no longer has to be tied to a deadly driven race. The end of this race would, in turn, also stop the four tsunamis.
3. The third goal of New Work is the ascent toward a new culture. This will require the development of a range of new institutions: completely differently designed kindergartens, schools that have almost nothing in common with today’s schools, and 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 far 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 height, this culture will also be more extravagant, in the Shakespearean sense: a culture in which anger can have the force of King Lear, jealousy the force of Othello, and love the force of Juliet.
New Work – Falling in Love with Life
„Work can be something wonderful.“
Central to New Work is a reversal. In the past, the task to be completed was the goal and the human being was the tool needed for it. New Work wants to reverse this condition. We should not serve work; work should serve us and give us strength and energy so that we become more alive, more complete, and stronger human beings.
Frithjof Bergmann grounds his idea in a radically different system of thought and values. In particular, the inherited system of exhausting wage labor must be radically reduced and replaced by elements of community work and self-provisioning, especially through the use of high tech. The temporal and economic freedom gained in this way is used to do the work we really, really want.
The goal of New Work is therefore consciously and seriously chosen work, genuinely wanted work that places individual human need at the center. It enables a modern, self-determined, peaceful, and fulfilled life.
New Work as the Work Concept of the Future
The central values of New Work are independence, freedom, and participation in community. New Work is meant to offer new spaces for creativity and the unfolding of one’s own personality, so that something truly essential and important can be contributed to the labor market and to the structures of work. Bergmann himself describes this with the words: „work that one really, really wants.“
Self-determined action stands at the center of New Work, while the old rigid working methods belong to the past. Above all, this means that employees are no longer bound to fixed working times and places. Through digitalization, more and more people can work from different places in the world and from different time zones. With computers and the internet, knowledge workers can contribute to a company project based, for example, in Berlin while working from another city such as Sydney or New York. The increased autonomy that comes with this way of working allows workers to organize themselves and work toward agreed goals.
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