Reflections on the 2014 Re-imagining Work conference

At the registration desk of the the conference we were given this book: New Work New Culture Reader. When we got back to Toronto, we started to read it (no time in Detroit).

It raises plenty to think about.

A conversation about New Work New Culture

The conference begins with a transcribed conversation in early 2014 about the planned conference between Grace Boggs, Frithjof Bergman, Kim Sherobi, Barbara Stachowski, Rick Feldman, and Frank Joyce.

Some excerpts:

P.9: Grace: I think the ecofeminist movement particularly has pointed out how women's ways of caring do not count the hours....And I think that aspect of women's work, and how new work makes that possible would be very important.

Frank: ...In that context the J.O.B. system is all about counting the hours and it's all about keeping track and it's all about fighting over the hours and who's in charge of counting and what each hour is worth.

Barb: ...You don't check in, you don't check out, you don't clock in, you don't clock out...you do what needs to be done.

Frank: ...the J.O.B. system controls how we spend out time, within a day and within a week and within a lifetime. The job of being a parent for example within the J.O.B. system is to get the kid ready to get a J.O.B. So it controls how we think about parenting and how we think about education and what it is children need to know. And then of course the children grow up thinking that the purpose of life is to have a J.O.B. or to have a career, which is kind of the same thing.

Rick: ....It was not inevitable that capitalism emerged. People made choices, people lost battles. It was about power. We're at a similar moment. Ideas matter, and technology has provided us with the basis to take the best from that epoch before capitalism...but also the best that capitalism did in terms of technology and production. Whether it would have happened another way we don't know, but technology provides the spaces for community production.

Frank:....let's say I can make a television set in a garage. But what if I need copper to make that television set and to run that fabricator but we have exhausted the world's supply of copper? Then what happens?

Frithjof:....For quite some time I have been saying that we will not run out of electricity, that's ridiculous. In fact we are constantly inventing new ways of making electricity and there are now so many ways of making electricity that electricity, the scarcity of it, is almost no longer a problem. And I would say something like that about copper -- we're very smart. If we do run out of copper we'll find some other material that will do very well what copper did not as well. So we'll improve the outcome.

Kim: ....So many in my community, in the African American community, have said, we didn't even know we were poor. And now I ask the question, when did you find out? When did you decide you were poor? Who told you you were poor? And you know, most of them said, "when I went to college." A lot of people come back and say, "When I went to college and I..." or "When I was exposed to this" because they didn't have the things and that's when they felt poor. Prior to that when they didn't have money, when we didn't have money none of us felt poor because we had a richer life."

Grace:...I can imagine Jimmy having this conversation...even when I was a kid, people went to the store- on a regular basis. Then people got the large supermarkets. That even started with refrigeration. When we look at this we have to be very historical...people did not consciously know that they were going to give up all those relationships as they became more independent...And so the black community did what the American community did, which was putting economic advancement, individual freedom above those relationships....There is this whole thing between needs and wants and what are the cultural values that are more important. So Jimmy said in the next American Revolution we will be giving up things, right?

Comment: excerpt from an essay by Ivan Illich, 1972 -- he and Jimmy Boggs, and this circle of friends, are on the same page:

At present we conceive of political activity as common agreement as to the minimum which one must guarantee to all people in a society in order to make it possible for them to live. That minimum is always conceived as an institutional output that is inevitably a commodity: so much education, so much health, so much food, so much land, or whatever. By setting minimums as our goals for political programs and action, we inevitably construct different levels, depending on how rich a society is, of launching platforms on which all people labor to get a few men off the pad -- a true inversion of political realities.

Politics which would be truly critical...inevitably must be concerned with setting maximums....It is evident, to me at least, that social criticism which does not seek majority agreement on the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy, cannot be radical...For the first time in history, and I give you only one of the Beatitudes as an example, one will be able to give scientific proof that "blessed are the poor" who voluntarily set community limits to what shall be enough and therefore good enough for our society. Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the earth. [ivan illich, "how will we pass on christianity?" in The Critic, Vol.XXX, #3, 1972. Pub.by the Thomas More Society of Chicago.]

Kim:...Now that we know what comes out of being materialistic, let's look at the best practices in our community, and let's create something else.

Frithjof:...A community making things is a way of creating community, maybe one of the most effective and powerful and feasible ways of creating community. I think working together does create community maybe more than all kinds of ethereal talk.

Grace: Community cannot grow out of the mode of production...

Kim: ...I'm not talking about people in poor countries who have never had any money. I'm talking about those of us who've had resources who have not considered others or maybe who need to change so we can help people who haven't had any resources at all....I can just share what my experience has been having some of those things...

Alternet post by Frithjof Bergmann: 4 Calamities Destroying America's Economy Being Ignores by Elites

Excerpt, p.25

....It is stunning that there are whole shelves of books about the job-problem, but the reality of the loss of working on farms has rarely been included in the workforce calculations. In essence it means that 75% of the total working population have been cut off from their work and that the need to find re-employment for that huge number is part of the monster-problem that we are failing to even identify let alone solve.

....None of these causes are "circular," or as is sometimes expressed, cyclical, which recoveries by definition are. All four are linear: automation, globalization, destruction of the environment and the migration away from the land will grow, far beyond where they are now, and will multiply. The inequality will become even more monstrous and more dangerous than it is now.....The faith that we are in a circular turning wheel situation, and that automatically, obedient to the laws of economics, we move toward equilibrium, is totally unfounded. It is just a misguided medieval superstition.

Frithjof Bermann, A Critique of Mass Manufacturing

Excerpt, p. 29

Imagine...a way of producing where one machine, but one of so far utterly unimagined flexibility and capacities for modulation and adjustment, stands as alone as a flagpole and makes a seemingly endless and unlimited variety of products so that people near it can amble up to it, casually one by one and first describe what they want and then, only a little while later pick up the new product and start immediately to put it to use.

p.30

...We do realize that we are technologically many miles from achieving in manufacturing the equivalent to the reality that we already have attained in the kingdom of information: something like full-fledged small factories in individual houses, so widely dispersed that manufacturing could take place virtually anywhere with only the most minimal infrastructure, and in a fashion that would be as autonomous as not long ago was farming.

Richard Feldman, Re-imagining Work: Another Production is Possible

Excerpt p.63

....With new advances in technology, we can manufacture anything and everything we need in community workshops with the same ease with which community gardeners now produce their own food, writers publish their own book, and filmmakers produce their own films. In small places, small rooms, on every block, we can produce clothes, shoe, musical instruments, electricity, even refrigerators, microwave ovens, computers, motor cycles, or bikes. This means that community people can decide our particular needs and then do the Work to meet these needs in the quantities needed.

Matthew Lewis, Model D "On the Ground: youth entrepreneurship in action"

Excerpt, p.67

Many big things got started in garages -- companies like Hewlett Packard, Apple Computers, Amazon.com all launched from the place where most Americans store their cars. Henry Ford, perhaps the world's most famous garage tinkerer, built his first horseless carriage, which he called the quadricycle, over the course of two years in the garage (carriage house, to be precise) behind his Detroit home at 58 Bagley Street. What he made there was a prototype he showed to investors to convince them to finance the Ford Motor Company, a manufacturing concern that would revolutionize modern existence in the 20th century.

The Brightmoor Woodworkers, a 21st century manufacturing concern, also grew out of a garage.

They make hand-carved wooden letters for signs, they salvage bikes, they silk-screen t-shirts, and they're working on a customized trike coffee cart. Hmm. Ford himself took 12 years to get his company started selling Model-T cars.

Blair Evans (Incite Focus): Create Anything, Anywhere.

Excerpt, p.74

Larry Gabriel (Metro Times): New Work Field Street Collective's New Paradigm

excerpts, p.110, 111

Quoting collective member Peggy Hong: "Most New Work communities begin with investors; some have investors with deep pockets. We do have backers but, even so, we didn't have any major investors." (So that made their house repair very slow).

p.111:

Bart Eddy, New Work/New Culture Education (From the 'Inside-Out')

excerpt, p.115

As an educator and social entrepreneur, it is my responsibility to recognize that every child has his or her unique pathway into this world, and that it is my aim to awaken every person to their "calling" in life. It is the teacher who will help the child to bring their dreams into reality and their vision into action. The central question becomes: "how do we bring the gifts of the developing human being into this world?"

For parents and educators the answer to this question resides in the understanding that the developing child must find must be helped to find the proper balance between their thinking, feeling and willing; the thinking as it relates to the academic; the feeling life as it relates to the artistic and social; and the development of the forces of the will as exemplified by learning how to do practical 'hands-on' work in the world. When these three forces are brought into a harmonious relationship, then it becomes possible to mentor the child into the awakening of his or her own very special gifts.

excerpt, p.117

So in our training, we take the youth worker through a process that emulates the Apprentice, Journeyman, Mater and Entrepreneur. The Apprentice: Students must first commit themselves to doing the physical work and demonstrate the personal effort/discipline in creating something. The Journeyman: Students must learn to work skillfully with the tools and the materials that will be needed to accomplish the work and to accept the guidance of the teacher. The Master: Once the student has mastered the work, he or she becomes the teacher and instructs others in the techniques and processes. The Entrepreneur: At this level, the student becomes an innovator, creating new solutions and businesses designed to solve social, economic and environmental problems in their community. As a team worker, they will come to the recognition that entrepreneurship finds is place and purpose in the community as part of a broader collective effort.

Our work through the Sunbridge International Collaborative is undergoing a major transition and expansion a we reach out to a broader constituency in the city, establish national connections and open our Asian counterpart in Beijing....Our mission is to awaken each and every young person to their 'calling' and place and purpose in the world. In essence, we are creating a 'sanctuary' whereby the workbench becomes the altar for New Work in the world.