THE BRIEFEST POSSIBLE SUMMARY OF NEW WORK

Frithjof Bergmann

New Work is an ascent, an up-coming through the intelligent and imaginative use of a spate of startlingly innovative technologies, some of which are extremely basic, while others are miles beyond where computers are now. These technologies have in common that they are all small-scale and small-space. They no longer require gigantic factories with long lines of enormous machines that necessitate boatloads of capital. Instead, they can be grouped together in a neighborhood, or a village or a community center. In short, one of New Work’s The Transformation from Industrial to Community Production Small Rooms. The result is the creation of new enterprises, but progressively the increasing local production of food, housing, and energy, and equally of furniture, appliances and clothing,

The foundation of this new economy is a new system of work and eventually a new life-style and culture can be evolved. 10 hours per week, more than 10 hours per week. Another 10 hours they are using the radically innovative small-scale and smallroom technologies that are the industrial technologies of the past. In the third place, they are doing what they are doing, but they are giving them vitality and strength.

The Goals of New Work are:

  1. The alleviation and eventual eradication of poverty in all countries everywhere. This can not be achieved by the ever more desperate efforts to create more jobs. But it can be attained through the further development and the slow global spread of the new economy of Community Production.
  2. A decisive reduction in the amount of bodywork and spirit crippling work;
  3. The undoing of the „Four Tsunamis“: a) The „butcher split“ between unbelievable wealth and dreadful poverty; b) the squandering of our natural resources; c) the ruination of our climate; d.) the ruination of our culture All four tsunamis were caused by the decimation, the degradation and the devaluation of work, which fundamentally brought about by three monster-sized causes: namely by (a) automation, (b) globalization, ( c) the worldwide migration from the rural lands to the slums. So far, the only response to the ever increasing shortage of jobs has been the frantic escalation of economic growth. New work puts on the job to do more and more jobs on the job: the work of community production for New Work obviates the compulsive galloping race for economic growth. For once we have an abundance of work, and with this two additions that is what we would have, making the economy grow no longer a mortally driven race.
  4. The fourth goal of New Work is the ascent to a New Culture. This is the kindergarten in which we are learning how to develop a new kind of school. and based on these new forms of social relationships and a wholly new politics. The New Culture therefore wants to be more intelligent (far less wasteful), more humane (with less poverty than we have now) and therefore more cheerful (for many more willing to do that their calling.) In its pinnacle this culture wants to be more flamboyant which means more Shakespearean…