LFC 

Everyone’s Talking about Detroit

By  Grace Lee Boggs

1/31-2/4, 2012

             Frithjof Bergmann, philosopher and community catalyst for HiTech Self- Providing (HTSP) work,  just emailed us from  Europe that “ Everyone’ s talking  about Detroit.”

              YES Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, has just posted The Tale of Two Cities, an article contrasting the localization of Detroit’s economy with the urbanization and globalization of Beijing’s by Helena Norbert-Hodge who directed the documentary film “The  Economics of Happiness.”

         “About  15 years ago,” she writes, “I visited rural China, and found that despite decades of Maoism, the people I encountered were able to meet most of their basic needs locally, using their own labor and ingenious small-scale technologies. In the villages, we were greeted with spontaneous laughter and humor, simple but delicious food, and examples of vibrant, intergenerational cooperation.

             “When I visited China again a few years ago, while shooting footage for The Economics of Happiness, much had changed. Thanks to global trade agreements, Western corporations and banks had moved their operations there, in search of cheap labor and lax environmental standards.

            “As a result, China’s cities had grown at a furious rate: Beijing’s population alone to about 20 million. Many villagers had been drawn into the cities by the siren song of a ‘modern life’ offered by these supposed opportunities. Among those with ‘good’ jobs in a TNC-linked factory, the work week ran 80 hours or more; the rest struggled to feed themselves and their families on meager and inconsistent wages. According to GDP, people had prospered, but living amid Beijing’s grimy streets, gridlocked traffic and choking pollution, their quality of life had actually declined. Meanwhile the gap between rich and poor was widening dramatically.

            “This wasn’t good news for the environment either. Far from being more efficient, urbanization causes per capita resource use to rise dramatically. When people are concentrated in a high-rise world of cement, steel and plastic, every need—food, water, building materials—has to be met from outside, requiring massive investments in infrastructure, along with huge amounts of fossil fuel for transport.

            “On the other side of the planet, the city of Detroit is moving in the opposite direction. Having tied its economy to the fate of the auto industry, Detroit suffered a steady loss of jobs as global competition and outsourcing led to factory closures—another symptom of globalization. But when our film team went there five years ago, we found a grassroots revolution underway. Tucked into streets lined with empty houses and crumbling factories, nearly 200 community gardens had sprouted up. These green oases provided a gathering place for community members, encouraging a sense of sharing, cooperation and belonging, and providing a vital link to the natural world. Today Detroit boasts more than 2,000 urban agriculture projects, each one helping to bring life back into the heart of the city.

“In villages, towns and big cities throughout the industrialized world, a whole host of initiatives are helping to rebuild local economies, reconnecting people with each other and the earth. The importance of this fledgling movement should not be underestimated: while the Occupy activists are asking fundamental questions about the nature of our economic system, these locally-based projects are beginning to demonstrate a tangible alternative: localization.

“Localization doesn’t mean ending trade or producing everything we need at the village level; it simply means meeting as many of our needs as close to home as possible. This not only reduces energy use and greenhouse gas emissions; it also fosters well being. The smaller scale of local production means less pollution, and a healthier living environment. Localization also builds a foundation for psychological wellness by providing a sense of belonging to place and community.

         At the Boggs Center we are also receiving enthusiastic  responses to Krista Tippett’s report of her visit to Detroit. For example: “I was just listening to your On Being interviews. Detroit as a city right now intrigues me. I am very interested in your placement as a community on the verge of something new and maybe unprecedented in American History.

             ‘I would like for my children to see it, this thing you are building. My husband and I have four children ages 16, 14, 9, and 8. They are three boys and a girl. Do you have any suggestion for a good way for us to structure a visit as a family that would include volunteer work and lodging/meals in your community? My husband has computer skills. I have midwifery training. All of us would be willing to help build or garden, clean or cook. I love to read and would be happy to teach/tutor. All of the children are very interested in Science and would enjoy helping other kids with projects, etc. We may be available in March for a few days (2 or 3) during spring break or in the summer for a longer visit.

                                                ———–

 See Boggs Center website/ boggscenter.org, for Bergmann HTSP

www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/a-d-of-two-cities-beijing-and-detroi

 http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/being/programs/2012/01/18/20120119_becoming_detroit_128.mp3

Foundations punishing power

By Shea Howell

Feb 4-11, 2012

Foundations wield enormous power in defining problems and determining solutions. In Detroit, as in much of the country, this is especially clear in the education of our children. Gates, Walmart and Broad have been directing educational policies, with little or no public accountability.

While many foundations play important roles in funding educational initiatives, the Gates Foundation has backed large-scale systemic change. Their first effort was the small schools initiative, breaking large schools into smaller units to reduce the drop out rate. After ten years and $2 billion dollars, Gates acknowledged in June of 2009 that the results had been “disappointing.”

In a speech announcing a change in direction, Gates said, “In the first four years of our work with new, small schools, most of the schools had achievement scores below district averages on reading and math assessments. In one set of schools we supported, graduation rates were no better than the statewide average, and reading and math scores were consistently below the average. The percentage of students attending college the year after graduating high school was up only 2.5 percentage points after five years. Simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for.”

“The defining feature of a great education is what happens in the classroom,” Gates said. “Everything starts from that and must be built around it. So we’re going to sharpen our focus on effective teaching—in particular supporting new standards, curriculum, instructional tools, and data that help teachers—because these changes trigger the biggest gains, they are hardest to scale, and that is what’s holding us back.”

This shift from small schools to classroom-based concerns has been at the root of turning our schools into abusive, test driven factories where students, teachers, schools and districts are judged by their performance on standardized tests.

Under first No Child Left Behind NCLB and now Race to the Top, encouraged by foundations, schools are becoming less effective and more punitive in their efforts to control students.

In a recent article about the school to prison pipeline Rethinking Schools links the foundation driven approach to punishment centered education:

“The more that schools—and now individual teachers—are assessed, rewarded, and fired on the basis of student test scores, the more incentive there is to push out students who bring down those scores. And the more schools become test-prep academies as opposed to communities committed to everyone’s success, the more hostile and regimented the atmosphere becomes—the more like prison. …The rigid focus on test prep and scripted curriculum means that teachers need students to be compliant, quiet, in their seats, and willing to learn by rote for long periods of time. Security guards, cops in the hall, and score-conscious administrations suspend and expel “problem learners.”

Schools without compassion or understanding occupy communities instead of serve them.”

We know it is possible to create schools where children love to learn, where they follow their individual passions, creativity and unique interests. We know it is possible to create a sense of community where learning is valued because it is a means to solving common problems. Such learning happens all the time, but mostly in our wealthy suburban schools and rarely in our cities.

Increasingly, creative teachers, students and administrators are challenging this test driven madness. Rethinking Schools concluded that more and more people are

“…creating alternative approaches to safe school communities that rely on restorative justice and community building instead of criminalization…A critical piece of that struggle is defying the regimen of scripted curriculum and standardized tests, and building in its place creative, empowering school cultures centered on the lives and needs of our students and their families.”

Gingrich’s Victory in South Carolina

By Grace Lee Boggs

Last Saturday’s rout of Mitt Romney by Newt Gingrich in the South Carolina Republican primary is a warning that we are at a critical and very dangerous point in our history .

In the states where Republican primaries have taken place, the Republican base is mostly white lower middle and working class. This is a population which feels that it has lost a lot in the recent period. It feels victimized.

Like most Americans it has not only suffered economically from jobs and homes lost in the recession. Demographically it is no longer the majority. An African American has been elected president, Internationally our country is a declining empire, bogged down in unwinnable wars, owing the Peoples Republic of China trillions of dollars.

Until the January 21 South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney was the front runner because conventional wisdom viewed him as the Republican best situated to beat Obama in the November election.

But Romney never had the passionate support of the Republican base.

They did not identify with him. He was not a victim.He was too rich, too much a Harvard man, too much an offspring of the ruling class; (It was even discovered belatedly that he had narrowly lost the Iowa primary to former Senator Rick Santorum who campaigned as a worker).

By the South Carolina primary former House speaker Newt Gingrich, member of a military family, graduate of a small Southern college, and a student of history, had assessed the situation and figured out the strategy to beat Romney.

Appealing to the anger and sense of profound loss among working and lower middle class whites, he promised to restore the American dream of big paychecks, independence, empire.

His attempts to keep this promise will end in disaster and deeper demoralization. But his rout of Romney in the South Carolina primary challenges us to restore hope to the white working and lower middle class by shaking the world with a new American Dream that will grow our souls and bring out the best in us.

To catch a glimpse of this new dream, I recommend Krista Tippitt’s BECOMING DETROIT. You can listen to the podcast at

http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/being/programs/2012/01/18/20120119_becoming_detroit_128.mp3

Accounting for foundations

By Shea Howell

January 24, 2012

Foundations are playing an increasingly influential role in public life. They are using their enormous power to determine what they think are public problems and how these problems should be solved. While they often demand clear objectives and quantifiable results from the non-profit organizations they support, most foundations offer no such evaluation of their own functioning to the public. They operate without public oversight, evaluation or assessment. Most do not publish the possible conflicting interests of their board members.

In Detroit we are witnessing both the influence of foundations and their lack of accountability. For example, there has been no assessment of the destructive run of Robert Bobb, the Emergency Financial Manager of the Detroit Public Schools. While appointed by the governor, local foundations supplied about one third of Bobb’s $425,000 salary. What did those who helped pay for him think of his performance? How do they explain that under his authority the deficit he was supposed to reduce actually grew from $219 million to an estimated $327 million? Did they approve of his management style? His decisions?

And what about the failure of the Detroit Works Project? What has the foundation community learned from this effort? Why did they reappoint Toni Griffin to head the project that she bungled so badly? Why are Kresge and Ford continuing to support a process that they indicated they knew was not working?

Education and the shape of the city are fundamental public concerns. Yet foundation forces are spending millions of dollars influencing decisions that effect people’s lives, with no public accountability.

Since the 1980s the role of private foundations has been shifting from the support of agreed upon public goods to the initiation of public policies. Much of this shift, aided by increasingly generous tax policies, has been lead nationally by the Philanthropy Roundtable. The guiding principles of the Roundtable were developed by William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Simon noted that many of the activities foundations supported in the 1960’s and 1970’s were efforts at greater democratization and equality. This, Simon said, was in opposition to real interests of foundations and the corporations that provided their resources.

In his 1978 book, A Time for Truth, Simon wrote, “Most private funds … flow ceaselessly to the very institutions which are philosophically committed to the destruction of capitalism. … [T]he great corporations of America sustain the major universities, with no regard for the content of their teachings [and sustain] the major foundations, which nurture the most destructive egalitarian trends.”

The Philanthropic Roundtable was intended to rectify the problem.

According to a recent report by David Morris, the shift in values can be seen in the embrace by the Roundtable of Charles G. Koch, who received the 2011 William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership. Noted for funding right wing efforts, in 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation made clear how much control it expects for its money. It donated millions to Florida State University for the school’s economics department. The money came with the understanding that that Koch would have the authority to approve who filled the positions and what would be taught.

Morris concludes, “Just to be clear here. The public is subsidizing possibly to the tune of 50 percent charitable contributions to a public university that give control to a private person to hire professors who will teach what may be a required course that will educate the students about the evils of government.”

The foundation community in Detroit has the opportunity to reassess what is becoming an increasingly destructive relationship. They can begin by asking what it would mean for them to be as accountable to the public as they demand organizations are to foundations?

Visionary Organizing in Detroit

By Grace Lee Boggs

Jan. 14-21, 2012

Last Saturday’s celebration of Dr. King’s birthday at the Church of the Messiah in Detroit was an instructive example of visionary organizing by members and friends of the Boggs Center.

In planning the program we recognized that finding a job is now the main concern of Detroit’s young people. Also that for most of them Dr. King and the civil rights struggle are nearly as remote as Frederick Douglass and the struggle against slavery in the 19th century.

Our program began with a video montage of small groups growing their own food and building community in Detroit. This was followed by a power point presentation of excerpts from King’s speeches,. I especially welcomed this excerpt from his 1967 anti= Vietnam war speech;

‘”We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”

Our main speaker was philosopher and community catalyst Frithjof Bergmann. Bergmann said that one of the main reasons why we are a thing-oriented rather than a person-oriented society is that most jobs in our industrial society manacle us to machines.

So we try to compensate for our dehumanization on the job by struggling for higher wages that enable us to buy bigger cars and fancier clothes. In other words, we become consumers and materialists, more concerned with our possessions than with community or our relationships with each other.

However, this job system is only a few hundred years old and it is rapidly being made obsolete by HI-Tech which eliminates jobs but also makes it possible for local groups to produce most of our real needs ( e.g. for clothing, housing and transportation) with the same ease with which it has made possible independent book and film production.

Therefore since we can now practice the system of self-reliant local production of most of our real needs, we should not be trying to bring back a job system which is not only dehumanizing but has jeopardized all life on our planet by poisoning our air and our waters.

Instead of organizing marches and demonstrations demanding jobs, as many radical and community organizations have been doing, we need to use Hi Tech to make our commiuities more self-reliant.

Church of the Messiah Pastor Berry talked aout how much his congregation has grown since his church created a. neighborhood housing program and self- help work programs for young people.

We broke up into small groups to share our thoughts, activities and questions.

In my closing remarks I suggested that participants go to the Bogggs Center website boggdscenter.org to learn more about New Work and Bergmann’s ideas.

I also recommended The Third Wave, the best selling book by Alvin Toffler which was published in the 1980s, in paperback is readily available in second hand bookstores.

Foundations of public good

By Shea Howell

January 3, 2012

The Occupy Wall Street movement has opened up the conversation about the control the 1% have over public policy. While we all know that much of this control comes through good old-fashioned campaign contributions and high priced lobbyists, the role of foundations in directing policy has been less understood. But more and more, journalists are exploring the murky world of foundation decision making and the outsized influence these foundations have on public policy.

Nowhere is this influence clearer than in the city of Detroit. In spite of the turmoil over a looming financial collapse, Mayor Bing chose to emphasize the return of the Detroit Works Project. This foundation led initiative to redesign the city was widely considered a failure. It succeeded only in increasing tensions, decreasing public trust, and enraging many citizens who believe that downsizing Detroit means moving people out of their homes and neighborhoods.

The return of Toni Griffin to the leadership of the project demonstrates just how little the mayor and the foundations paying her salary understand about their flawed process. Rather than acknowledging to the public that the whole idea has been badly handled, the re-launched Detroit Works Project seems to think it has a public relations problem. Its emphasis now is convincing citizens to agree with its decisions. Charles Cross, the co-director of community engagement, stresses the openness of the group to answer questions. He explains that the new location in Eastern Market gives a place where “people can walk off the street and talk to somebody. Not somebody who takes their name and passes along a message, but somebody who is right there and is knowledgeable about the project.”

This physical location is augmented by street teams, posters, bus ride-alongs and the use of social media, all designed to “answer questions.”

What neither the organizers, the mayor nor the foundations seem to understand is that democracy is more than asking questions. It is certainly more than officials giving vague answers. Democracy includes the right to say no.

Democracy requires the ability to make real decisions about our own future. It does not mean creating public relations campaigns to get people to agree to things they know are not in their own interest. It means the ability to direct resources for the common good.

Democracy is being subverted by foundations whose interests seem less about the common good and more about imposing their particular vision of progress on the rest of us.

Whether it is Gates Foundation efforts to convince us that charter schools will save education or Kresge, Skillman and company telling us that some neighborhoods are better than others, we the other 99% need to challenge the role these foundations are playing in public life.

In a recent article by David Morris on foundation giving, he says:

“Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. “At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent,” opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. “We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities.”

He concludes, “While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite.”

The old ways of decision-making, whether influenced by corporate donations or foundation dollars, will not create a new city. That challenge requires us to create new, meaningful ways to engage with one another to determine our future.

Celebrating Dr. King’s birthday in 2012

By Grace Lee Boggs

Jan. 7-14, 2012

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Born on January 15, 1929, he was only 39 years old.

 To honor King’ life Detroit Congressman John Conyers and Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke promptly introduced a bill in Congress to make his birthday a national holiday. In 1981 Stevie Wonder popularized the campaign with his “Happy Birthday” song, and in1983 President Reagan signed a bill, proposed by Representative Katie Hall of Indiana, creating a federal holiday to honor King.

It was an important victory. But like most victories, it presented us with a new and more challenging question. How do we celebrate King’s birthday in a way that makes his life meaningful to future generations? How do we keep him from being coopted, canonized, or commercialized as Jesus Christ (Christmas and Black Friday) and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (Presidents weekend) have been?

The King holiday was observed for the first time on January 20, 1986. Since then I’ve tried to come up with answers.

In 2002, I was in a “Rehearsal for the Future” workshop led by my good friend UM Professor Bunyan Bryant who challenged us each to write a 21st century story about the King holiday. Inspired by the way Detroit Summer youth were rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit from the ground up, I wrote “Detroit 2032,” a fable about how Detroit youth mobilized themselves to clear the streets after a huge blizzard so that people could get to a MLK celebration at Cobo Hall.

In 2003 as the keynote speaker at the UM celebration, I emphasized that “We must be the change.” Both Gandhi and MLK, I said, had recognized the need to Transform both ourselves and our institutions. That two-sided transformation is the essence of an American Revolution.

Four years later I keynoted the MLK holiday celebration at Eastern Michigan University (whose students are mainly from Michigan cities like Detroit). I said that we need to “Recapture MLK’s Radical Revolutionary Spirit and Create Cities and Communities of Hope.”

It was what we were struggling to do in Detroit.

Through these experiences I’ve learned that History is not mainly about the past. It is, as historian E.H.Carr has helped us understand, a dialogue between the past and the present.

In other words, one way to celebrate dead heroes is by examining them in the light of our present problems and deciding what they can or cannot contribute to the solution of these problems and therefore what we have to contribute based upon where we are now on the clock of the world.

That is how we plan to celebrate MLK’s birthday this year.

On Saturday, January 14,from 2-5 p.m. at the Church of the Messiah on Detroit’s east side, in a city which is becoming increasingly dangerous because people can’t find jobs, we will celebrate Dr, King’s birthday by explaining and demonstrating how HiTech is making it necessary and possible for us to Re-Imagine Work.

Frithjof Bergman will explain, and local activists will demonstrate that although HiTech has eliminated millions of Jobs, it also now makes it possible for small groups in local communities to produce their own necessities (housing, clothing and transportation) just as it has made it possible for writers and artists to produce and distribute their own books, films,etc

So there is useful Work for everyone!!!! …..we celebrated Dr, King’s birthday by explaining and demonstrating how HiTech is making it necessary and possible for us to Re-Imagine Work.

Lessons from Marathon?

By Shea Howell

The refusal of the corporate elite and foundations to acknowledge the failure of Detroit Works is reaching laughable proportions. Last week, Stephen Henderson of the Detroit Free Press and American Black Journal on PBS hosted a show touting the Marathon Petroleum Company’s effort to buy out homeowners in Oakwood Heights as a possible model for Mayor Bing’s efforts at “neighborhood consolidation.” This show followed an editorial by Mr. Henderson echoing the same theme. Mr. Henderson wrote:

“Marathon’s effort might best be described as Detroit Works writ small, a laboratory to see how some of your biggest ideas about creating density and emptying out dying neighborhoods might actually play out. There should be lots to learn.”

The most important lesson Mr. Henderson is looking for is how to move people from one place to another, as though we are pawns on a chessboard. He says, “In a city of more than 700,000, with 139 square miles and perhaps tens of thousands of people who need to be moved to create a more rational population footprint, a successful Detroit Works program could reach harrowing figures pretty quickly. There has been no talk about who would pay that bill.”

Mr. Henderson persists in repeating the tired argument that “tens of thousands” “need to be moved” because this would save the city money on services. He says the mayor “should pay attention to the impact on city services from the Marathon program.” He asks, “At what point does it become possible to stop doing things like removing fallen trees or fixing infrastructure? What does it mean for schools, police and fire service, bus routes?”

Neither of Mr. Henderson’s guests on American Black Journal went along with his enthusiastic endorsement of the Marathon efforts. Robin Boyle, the head of urban planning and geography at Wayne State University pointed out that if only 5% of the current homeowners slated for “relocation” were offered the same deal; it would cost the city $600 million. Moreover Mr. Boyle rejected the idea that such a move would have much of an impact on city services, as most are tied to physical structures requiring on going maintenance to reach the whole city.

John Gallagher whose book Re-imagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City showcases the innovative community-building work happening in the city posed two visions for the future of the city. On the one hand, he said, there are those who back the Detroit Works Project and see some kind of quick, large scale reconfiguration of the city, often involving some combination of massive land use projects such as the reforestation proposal of Hantz farm. On the other hand, there is the image of a much more organic emergence of re-purposing land by people in the community. This sometimes means expanding the size of lots, and turning open land to green space, parks or gardens. These small-scale, community driven efforts that he documents so well, are virtually unseen by Mr. Henderson and those who back Detroit Works. Yet this is the only approach that will sustain the evolution of a new city that serves its people and protects its resources.

At the end the show, Mr. Henderson mused that perhaps the reason Marathon can achieve success is because it is a private company, unencumbered by the political issues facing elected officials.- Such thinking is at the heart of the misguided Detroit Works initiative. People engaged in discussion and disagreement are seen as problems to be managed. The idea that such conversations could produce new solutions to our common concerns is unimaginable. Yet this is precisely what Mr. Gallagher describes so well. It is our best hope for a re-imagined democracy as well as a re-imagined Detroit.

Technology and the shrinking job market could liberate us from meaningless work and allow us to do things we care deeply about.

An interview with Frithjof Bergmann, by Sarah van Gelder


According to philosopher and community catalyst Frithjof Bergmann, we are less free than we think, surrounded as we are by endless trivial choices. We will only really be free when we have the option of doing things with our lives that we care deeply about.

The current job crisis, in which thousands find themselves unable to work in their fields, is forcing many people to reconsider what they want to do with their lives. Frithjof Bergmann started New Work to encourage that exploration at the deepest levels and to teach the skills that will enable people to make their dreams a reality. If many people were empowered to make these kinds of choices, the ripple effects would be felt throughout the culture.

Frithjof Bergmann has worked with individuals and communities in the US, Canada, and Germany on developing positive strategies for dealing with the changing nature of work. He is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, author of On Being Free (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) and founder of the Center for New Work., 2200 Fuller Road, Suite 1204B, Ann Arbor, MI 48105.   



Sarah: Can you tell me how the idea of New Work got started?

Frithjof: General Motors had announced that they would automate in an extraordinarily thorough fashion the plant in Flint. We opened the Center for New Work there in 1984, and the first major proposal we advanced was that, instead of splitting Flint – half of it becoming unemployed and the other half of it working overtime – why not let everyone work six months in the factories? During the other six months, make it possible for the workers to do something that they passionately wanted to do. 

This was our first opportunity to work with unions and management to see if the idea of New Work could be turned into practice. While we weren’t able to do all we had hoped to do, we did speak to thousands of people individually to help them discover what they seriously wanted to do. In the end, some started small business, some went back to school, some decided they wanted more time with their children. In one case, a woman came to realize how much she enjoyed working with wood and went on to become a carpenter.

Sarah: How do you define New Work? 

Frithjof: There are two answers: New Work represents the effort to redirect the use of technology so that it isn’t used simply to speed up the work and in the process ruin the world – turning rivers into sewers and rain into acid. 

The purpose of technology should be to reduce the oppressive, spirit-breaking, dementing power of work – to use machines to do the work that is boring and repetitive. Then human beings can do the creative, imaginative, uplifting work. 

So New Work is simply the attempt to allow people, for at least some of their time, to do something they passionately want to do, something they deeply believe in.

The other definition comes from the editorial page of The New York Times: “The way Americans work has to be rethought from the ground up.” We need a wholesale, integrated, organic, new construction of work, with new instruments to make up for the shortage of jobs and to assist in the redistribution of wealth. 

Sarah: That’s a pretty tall order!

Frithjof: Most people assume that the job system we have today has existed since the Stone Age, and that it is therefore unthinkable that we could suddenly run out of jobs. But our job system is actually only 200 years old! 

The current job system is based on the idea that jobs redistribute wealth: capitalists made profits, the profit was distributed when workers got paid, and the workers again helped the capitalists to amass wealth. So it was like rain: the profits rose to the top, but then they came down like rain in the form of wages. 

This is now no longer the case in the same way as it was before. It is very possible now for people to make very large sums of money without employing anybody, either by buying whole companies in leveraged buy-outs and piecing them out like a butchered cow, or by having factories that employ very, very few people. 

One of the really frightful aspects of this situation is that we have something like a third of the population working at an utterly insane pace, and on the other side, close to half of the population is obviously underemployed. It’s crazy. 

Sarah: What you’re talking about goes way beyond the traditional progressive goals of “full employment.” You’re talking about making work itself a wonderful meaningful experience.

Frithjof: Not only should wonderful things occur in work, but maybe I would even put it more provocatively and say that the very best things occur only in work! As examples, I’d start with people like Toni Morrison or Martha Graham or Einstein of course, or Stravinsky, or any number of other people, who, at 90 were still wonderfully vital and intense and clearly performing their work with an astounding capacity.

When one is working in a similar way to these people, it’s quite common to feel that people neglect even their intimate relationships and their children precisely because their work is so fascinating, so absorbing, so consuming, and so exciting; now this is what work can be at its best.

Sarah: The examples you mentioned are of people who have excelled at the very top of their fields, and in many cases these are very creative fields. Can work be as exciting for people who have more ordinary types of jobs?

Frithjof: My example of course is elitist, and intentionally so, almost to the point of wanting to irritate people so that one can then ask, “How does work become like that for everybody?” 

In the great floods in Iowa this fall, there were descriptions of people who worked with an amazing intensity all night long, lugging sandbags, in order to stop the Mississippi and protect this or that village. This shows that a very repetitive task, a very humble task, namely lugging sandbags around, can become work that people do with the same enthusiasm with which Kepler worked on his Laws – if the context is right.

Sarah: What is it that creates that level of enthusiasm?

Frithjof: Purpose is the decisive criteria. If you feel that the work you do serves some powerful, interesting, and inspiring purpose, then it becomes quite easy to do. 

For many car workers, for example, what makes their work a kind of affliction is precisely that they experience it as so utterly pointless, or even worse, as doing something that is adding to a disease. The cars they are making are not of first-rate quality, the exhaust will poison the air, and there is a sense that people don’t really need the cars – all of that has much more to do with making work painful than the sheer monotony of it. 

One of the most exhilarating experiences of my life was to come to the realization that if you persist in asking people what they really want, and if you create real alternatives, people choose to do work that helps other people, that makes a contribution. 

The fact that people, when given a choice, want to do work with a purpose represents a source of social energy that is the equivalent of the steam engine. You can rethink the economy and much else about our culture if that turns out to be true.

Sarah: What changes will be needed to get us to the point where people could do the work they feel passionate about?

Frithjof: First, I prefer to think in evolutionary terms. Although automation and the elimination of labor have taken on epidemic proportions, I don’t think that jobs will end. Instead, the present job structure will slowly contract as a new structure and a new culture will gradually emerge. 

Given that, the first major step toward a New Work culture is for people to become what we call intelligently self-providing. This approach harks back to the sense of independence and self-reliance that was typical of farmers, but with important differences. 

The old way of being self-providing involved back-breaking work. Actually, the idea of high-tech self-providing grew out of my own experience growing all of my own food and living virtually without cash. I realized that was not what I wanted, although sometimes I think if I had had a chain saw, I would never have gone back to teaching.

An example of the idea of high-tech self-providing is that you participate in the building of your apartment house. 

There are quite a good number of projects that I am associated with, particularly in Detroit, in which welfare mothers, inner-city African-Americans, and any number of people contribute their labor to upgrading and maintaining the apartment houses in which they live. There are different arrangements, but the upshot is that people put a certain amount of sweat equity into the houses and in return they get part ownership.

Along those lines, one of the ideas I’ve made into a kind of a symbol is roof gardens. There is no excuse whatever for not having each roof in a large city be a gorgeous, sumptuous garden with trees and flowers and berries and fruit. The air would improve, and food would be more immediately available. 

Sarah: What else is different about the self-providing you’re describing compared with what we normally think of as self-reliance?

Frithjof: We are teaching the skills people need to function in modern society – for example, how to do your shopping in a high-tech, intelligent way. 

We envision a counseling environment in which people would be asked to stop and think about their buying habits. Do you really want this? Are you just buying that because you’ve been hypnotized into wanting that, or are you buying it out of frustration? 

My experience working 10 years with auto workers is that they get so frustrated in their jobs that once every four months, in a rage, they go off to the nearest mall and fill up their pick-up truck with anything they can find.

For the things people really do want to buy, we want to offer an opportunity for someone sitting at a computer with minimal computer skills to be able to answer questions about where one can buy cheaper split peas, or a couch, or a tricycle. 

And, we are working on ways of transporting people to those cheap sources of goods. 

Sarah: You’re working on alternative modes of transportation as well?

Frithjof: Yes. I participated in an endeavor in Kassel, Germany, in which a group of people together used a fleet of very diverse vehicles from trucks to small electric cars to motorcycles. When someone wanted to use a vehicle, he or she would schedule it via electronic mail. 

I’m also very interested in automobiles with alternative energy sources. What many people aren’t aware of is that electric cars could be an example of self-providing. One could make one’s own electricity on one’s rooftop. 

That helps to spell out what we are thinking of as intelligent self-providing: technology, properly used, could make people extraordinarily independent. 

Sarah: So if someone is that independent, then when they work, they work out of choice.

Frithjof: That’s part of it. It makes all the difference in the world to feel that one is not chained to the money economy. Many people get ulcers, even if they have a reasonably good income, because they feel perpetually threatened. The only way not to feel threatened is to feel that, if need be, you can make it on your own. 

Sarah: What would it take for New Work to become a reality?

Frithjof: There are several parts to this. One thing we’re actively working on is to make the connection between the talent and the information that’s available in universities and the need to expand entrepreneurship in a city context. We want to get away from bake-sale entrepreneurship. Instead, we want to get people who have ideas to put those ideas into the service of new city-based businesses that could then be cutting edge and world class. 

Second, foundations could be more accessible, more dispersed and local, so there’s one every few blocks where people could present their ideas and get funded. 

We now have very expensive programs that try to address the extremes of human misery: from welfare programs to job training programs. We could do much better simply by making it possible for people who urgently and often quite desperately want to do something for their own communities, to do it! We could get the jobs that need doing done much cheaper and on a scale that we so far haven’t even imagined. 

A third area is to help people individually to discover what it is that they really want to do and then to help them to get their project financed. Many people need support for that because they often don’t know what they want to do. 

Restructuring institutions is not enough. The wonderful thing that technology could do for us is to liberate enough human energy so that we could work with each other on an individual basis and not just an institutional basis. 

Sarah: Where would the money come from for all this?

Frithjof: One source is to insist that, when layoffs occur, money be provided by the union and by the company cooperatively to make New Work possible for those who lose their jobs. The money could be used to help workers to start up businesses, for stipends, fellowships, training, all manner of things. 

As it is, the money is a kind of war chest; it’s blown on the battle between the workers who want to hang on to their jobs and the company who wants to get rid of them. 

The other way to pay for this type of New Work is through a gradual movement towards a more equitable system of pay in which people are paid in accordance with their contribution. 

Sarah: Why have you chosen to do so much work with young people?

Frithjof: It was a conscious decision, growing out of my work with the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a plant closed. I came to realize that car workers with 20 years seniority, even if they are laid off, are in incomparably better positions than 18-year-olds who have never done any work and for whom no work is available. 

We have now reached a point where a whole generation will grow up and find the door shut in their faces. I feel a horrible sense of anguish and rage about that. 

My sense of it is that we face the prospect of a rapid increase in violence and terrorism – of which we already have plenty – that could easily escalate toward permanent guerrilla warfare or even toward some sort of apocalyptic war between rich and poor.

Sarah: What can New Work offer to these young people?

Frithjof: I feel that it is urgent for young people to recognize that there is an alternative to unemployment; that we needn’t be victims of a malfunctioning job system; that we can create together an alternative work construction.

Sarah: You’ve mentioned a number of areas in which your approach and your concerns overlap those of environmentalists. But I gather there are also some areas of difference.

Frithjof: I feel that the environmental movement is in retreat, in part because there is frequently an impasse between the desire to, for example, save certain trees and the need people have for the work of cutting them down. 

You have to come to terms with the fact that jobs have become precious to the point where people will fight for them. If you’re a serious environmentalist, you’ve got to do something about work. 

I’ve worked with lumberjacks, and usually it turns out that there are things that they would rather do than cut down trees. Once one has discovered that – and it takes patience and it takes time – then one can make efforts to find those alternative sorts of work and to make them pay.

If New Work becomes a reality, the engine that drives us into the destruction of nature could finally be throttled and made to stop. Otherwise, as the job crisis intensifies, the animosity towards ecological thinking will increase. We think that all other efforts short of the complete re-construction of work are, frankly, futile. 

Sarah: Your work implies a broad cultural shift, not only a change in work. Can you describe the changes you see emerging in a New Work culture?

Frithjof: A far greater number of people would be working at more creative, more inventive, more autonomous work in every respect. We would bring in technology wherever it’s intelligent, economical, and sustainable in order to free up people to do more inventive work. 

This would, we think, result in abundance. We are close to abundance now, but keep fighting it because abundance threatens the job system. If we weren’t worried about jobs, we could automate all sorts of production and all sorts of services; goods could become phenomenally inexpensive. 

The consumer frenzy would pale and lose its force and its addictive power, and some kind of calm and dignity would return. If you have a chance to do something you really want to do, that already has some effect. But if you have learned to decide what you really want, then you don’t get onto this treadmill where you work at something you hate in order to buy something you loathe! 

Right now, so much social energy is tied up in an unnecessary way. If all that energy were freed, we could address the mega-social and ecological problems, from poverty to AIDS to education to race and gender. 

There’s an African proverb that says, “It takes a whole tribe to educate a single child.” We could have a situation in which, from the time you are five weeks old until you died, you could be accompanied by a hive of mentors, by people who understand you, and people who talk to you. The result would be a culture that is more humane, vastly more intelligent, more cheerful, more sensuous, and more flamboyant.


What’s Happening With New Work?

Frithjof Bergmann’s New Work approach is being tried in towns and cities ranging from the former East German town of Muehlhausen to inner-city Detroit, to Vancouver, British Columbia.

At the moment, Detroit is a major center of activity for advocates of New Work. From January 17th through 31st, WTVS, the Detroit public television station, is airing a series of documentaries and forums on work options. Frithjof was a chief consultant for the series and appears in a number of the segments.

Next, WTVS, in conjunction with Frithjof and other New Work advocates, will produce a video-print curriculum to be distributed in high schools throughout Michigan. The curriculum is aimed at helping young people prepare for the work crisis by developing resourcefulness, entrepreneurship, self-providing skills, and a capacity to look for their own calling. The curriculum – including video segments – should be completed by spring.

Other plans call for the creation of a center for New Work at a Detroit inner-city high school. The nuts and bolts of New Work and self-providing will be taught in a dome, which the students will help to build.

The group is also linking up with Detroit churches and community groups to give the kids a role in helping their community while further developing their skills.

In British Columbia, meanwhile, a group called New Work Associates has been giving workshops on New Work for some years. The group has developed a study guide based on Frithjof’s approach and is working on translating the concepts into comic book form.

For more information on the Detroit projects and the videos contact Fritz Williams at RD1 Box 920, Shermans Dale, PA 17090 or WTVS 7441 2nd Blvd., Detroit, MI 48202. Contact Anne Ironside of the New Work Associates at RR 1 U-30, Bowen Island, British Columbia, Canada, V0N IG0, for more information on their study guide, workshops, or comic book.

- Sarah van Gelder

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Foundations of public good

By Shea Howell

January 3, 2012

The Occupy Wall Street movement has opened up the conversation about the control the 1% have over public policy. While we all know that much of this control comes through good old-fashioned campaign contributions and high priced lobbyists, the role of foundations in directing policy has been less understood. But more and more, journalists are exploring the murky world of foundation decision making and the outsized influence these foundations have on public policy.

Nowhere is this influence clearer than in the city of Detroit. In spite of the turmoil over a looming financial collapse, Mayor Bing chose to emphasize the return of the Detroit Works Project. This foundation led initiative to redesign the city was widely considered a failure. It succeeded only in increasing tensions, decreasing public trust, and enraging many citizens who believe that downsizing Detroit means moving people out of their homes and neighborhoods.

The return of Toni Griffin to the leadership of the project demonstrates just how little the mayor and the foundations paying her salary understand about their flawed process. Rather than acknowledging to the public that the whole idea has been badly handled, the re-launched Detroit Works Project seems to think it has a public relations problem. Its emphasis now is convincing citizens to agree with its decisions. Charles Cross, the co-director of community engagement, stresses the openness of the group to answer questions. He explains that the new location in Eastern Market gives a place where “people can walk off the street and talk to somebody. Not somebody who takes their name and passes along a message, but somebody who is right there and is knowledgeable about the project.”

This physical location is augmented by street teams, posters, bus ride-alongs and the use of social media, all designed to “answer questions.”

What neither the organizers, the mayor nor the foundations seem to understand is that democracy is more than asking questions. It is certainly more than officials giving vague answers. Democracy includes the right to say no.

Democracy requires the ability to make real decisions about our own future. It does not mean creating public relations campaigns to get people to agree to things they know are not in their own interest. It means the ability to direct resources for the common good.

Democracy is being subverted by foundations whose interests seem less about the common good and more about imposing their particular vision of progress on the rest of us.

Whether it is Gates Foundation efforts to convince us that charter schools will save education or Kresge, Skillman and company telling us that some neighborhoods are better than others, we the other 99% need to challenge the role these foundations are playing in public life.

In a recent article by David Morris on foundation giving, he says:

“Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. “At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent,” opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. “We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities.”

He concludes, “While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite.”

The old ways of decision-making, whether influenced by corporate donations or foundation dollars, will not create a new city. That challenge requires us to create new, meaningful ways to engage with one another to determine our future.