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.
Hinterlasse einen Kommentar
An der Diskussion beteiligen?Hinterlasse uns deinen Kommentar!