Symposium Dürnstein 2018 – Follow-up report

Last weekend, the seventh Symposium Dürnstein, this year dedicated to the currently widely discussed topic of work and its shifting meanings, took place at Dürnstein Abbey in the Wachau region. Top-class experts from politics, economy, religion, philosophy and art discussed current developments and challenges.

In his highly acclaimed lecture on the fully booked opening evening, the renowned author and historian Philipp Blom took a look into the future. He expressed the suspicion that – as a society – we are refusing to face the future and instead want to extend the present into the future. However, he said, we have to decide whether we want to help shape the future or simply wait and see. Blom criticized the fact that alternatives to the prevailing orientations toward growth and consumption are hardly ever heard. The economy has to work for the people and not the other way around, he said.

The economic and social historian Andrea Komlosy addressed the concept of work from a social-historical perspective and illustrated how the understanding of what is seen as work and what is not has changed massively, especially since the 19th century. Unpaid work, which had been so important to the family household as a community of life and work, disappeared from the history of work during this period. However, considering what we subsume under work, we will never run out of it, Komlosy said.

Work in the age of digitalization
Mathias Binswanger, one of Switzerland's most influential economists, opened the discussion on digitalization and work. Under the dictum of growth, which has been the normal state of affairs since the beginning of the capitalist economy, digitization is advancing rapidly. In particular, digitization will displace work in the production process, while at the same time new jobs will be created in administration. In the future, our purchasing decisions will be made by algorithms, i.e., consumer sovereignty will become dependent on algorithms, and people will change from being active subjects to controlled objects. However, this development can be counteracted. Admittedly, the price of freedom and sovereignty will be a reduction in convenience.

Opportunities of digitization were discussed by a panel of experts from business, administration, trade unions and academia, led by migration researcher Gudrun Biffl. The discussion focused on the rapid technological developments of recent years, coupled with a shortage of skilled workers and competition for these skilled workers among national economies (Hermann Kopetz, emeritus professor of technical mathematics). Research will mainly take place where corresponding returns can be expected, and less where laborious work can be saved – i.e., we will have to intervene, steer more strongly and ask the distribution question (René Schindler from the trade union PRO-GE). Michael Wiesmüller from the BMVIT explained that the current developments lead to a polarization into the very high and the very low qualified. Politicians are called upon to act in this case, especially with regard to the mainstream of society. In rural areas, they are currently working on expanding the supply of digital networks, which they hope will create jobs independent of location and thus counteract migration (Walter Kirchler, Managing Director of NÖ Regional GmbH).

In his presentation, Herbert Buchinger, Chairman of AMS Austria, addressed the alleged unwillingness to work and explained on the basis of current data that a small proportion of the unemployed are not to be regarded as unwilling to work but as "less disciplined or more elective than the law allows." (Unemployment due to "condition gap": volume 2016 approx. 30,000 persons). The AMS itself wants to move away from occupational matching toward competence-oriented placement in the future.

The sense of work and the sense of life
Actress Katharina Stemberger spoke to Kunst Macht Arbeit about artistic processes in which work is flexible, non-linear and follows individual patterns. Under the auspices of digitalization, work was able to develop in this way, but then society would abolish itself in two generations, "because we simply can't have any more children, because we're living past each other." Sebastian Thieme, an economic and social ethicist, emphasized that standard economics pay little attention to questions of self-preservation. He clarified in a historical review that self-preservation in economic calculations is mostly based on a "minimum disaster level." The basic assumption is an economically and rationally calculating individual. The willingness to offer one's own labor power on the market decreases the lower the possibilities of adequate self-preservation turn out to be. Self-preservation represents the "missing link" between economic efficiency and ethics. According to sinologist Fabian Heubel, uselessness opens up the possibility of being free of use. He thus paraphrased central theses of Daoism and sees the release of workforce through digitalization as an opportunity for a return to self-cultivation.

Labor and globalization
The global North, through its imperial way of life, is creating difficulties for the people of the global South, who have been uprooted from their livelihoods, said political scientist Ulrich Brand, who opened the chapter on labor and globalization on Saturday morning. He said that exploitation has a lot to do with our everyday lives, that this is not so much a moral as a structural constellation that has to do with our norms of consumption. Our imperial way of life also stabilizes hierarchies and power structures in our country. Brand warned against putting all one's eggs in the technology basket, but instead to consider environmental and social standards for international trade and to regulate the financial markets.

Community worker Rehema B. Namaganda from Uganda, who works for the international organization FIAN, whose focus is food sovereignty, described the impact of development efforts using the example of a European company's investment in a coffee plantation. Uganda, like so many other countries in the global South, has a desire to attract foreign investors and industry to the country with the goal of increasing jobs, taxes and exports through more investment. Uganda provides land for this purpose, but in many cases it is obtained through land grabs.

Mathias Czaika, migration researcher at Danube University Krems, used empirical data to show that the proportion of the world's population living in "extreme poverty" below the internationally defined income threshold of 1.90 U.S. dollars per day has decreased significantly over the last two decades (from about 40% to about 10%; source: World Bank 2015). Empirically, he was also able to support the thesis that international migration tends to increase rather than decrease as development progresses. This is because the highest migration rates are not in countries where absolute poverty still prevails, but in so-called "emerging economies." But there are also other severe causes of migration, such as climate change, war and persecution, as in the case of refugees from Syria, Eritrea and Sudan.

Julianna Fehlinger from the global network Campesina questioned the term developing country, since the yardstick for this would only be economic development. In order for more impoverished people to have access to cheap food, this group would be played off against small farmers who work under precarious conditions in Europe and worldwide. Consumption alone, she concluded, cannot change the world; we must also see ourselves as political subjects.

The lecture by architect and urban planner Gabu Heindl was dedicated to the significance of public space from a social and democratic perspective against the backdrop of advancing commercialization tendencies. Public space is contested, she said, because it can be exploited profitably. Exclusions of specific people or groups are produced. However, free action and free space are the basis for the public sphere and thus for politics.

Alternatives for the future
In the concluding part of the symposium, alternative models for the future were discussed: Entrepreneur Daniel Häni recounted that in the run-up to his initiative for the vote on an unconditional basic income (Switzerland 2016), a particular question had preoccupied him: "What would you do if your income was taken care of?" In his opinion, social democracy in particular is called upon to find an answer to digitalization. As a researcher at the Finnish Social Insurance Fund, Pertti Honkanen is involved in the current experiment on an unconditional basic income. For the project, which is being carried out amid great media interest, 2,000 people were randomly selected. Initial results are expected after the project ends in December 2018.

According to Christian Felber, well-known as a publicist and initiator of the common good economy, the economy has distanced itself too far from people and is only considered in isolation. The common good economy represents a holistic alternative that includes ethical principles in the performance of a company. According to a survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation, 90% of people in Austria would prefer a new economic order as an alternative to the existing one. Common good balances and "ethical trade", which is to be settled between free trade and isolation, represented concrete alternatives. A current positive example is the municipality of Salzburg, which has decided to promote common-good-based companies.

Curator Ursula Baatz sums up: "The Symposium Dürnstein 2018 has shown that there is a need and a desire for a social discourse on how we generally want to shape our lives in the future, which alternative models for this already exist or would have to be developed, and which steering instruments could be applied".

Franz Delapina, Managing Director of the organizer NÖ Forschungs- und Bildungsges.m.b.H was pleased with the enthusiastic response to this year's symposium: "The symposium not only brought countless perspectives on a hotly debated topic to the table. It was also the best-attended symposium in the impressive ambiance of Dürnstein Abbey."

The next Symposium Dürnstein will take place from March 7–9 2019 on the topic "Democracy! Disgrace or Opportunity."

Press contact and Information

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Symposion Dürnstein online:
www.symposionduernstein.at
facebook.com/noe.forschung.bildung

Visuals of the Symposion Dürnstein 2018:
www.nfb.at/tertiaere-bildung/weiterentwicklung/symposion-duernstein/2018/fotos/

Fotocredits:
©NFB/Klaus Ranger