Here we outline a series of emergent relations of cultural production, over a couple of hundred years. Making a living economy needs to discover how to systematically mobilise all of these, in a radically altered mode of cultural production: a practice of radical knowing.
- Organic intellectual practice - Free association, self-organising - Modern (trans-modern) commoning - Facilitation - Participatory design of infrastructure
> Beware builders at work. These descriptions below of emergent relations of production are assemblies of working material, not finals.
**Organic intellectual practice** was highlighted for example in the 70s by Illich as ‘vernacular’ capability, in *Tools for conviviality* and *Deschooling society*.
Organic intellectual practice is a discovery of the Fordist era \[Gramsci xxx] which stands in opposition to the professional-managerial class of Fordist and post-Fordist society. Also, in opposition to revolutionary vanguard, priestly caste, bardic elite, etc, and the ‘collectivist’ stream of socialist aesthetics.
**Free association, self-organising** These are highlighted for example by Paulo Freire in his practice of conscientisation, which stands in opposition to the authoritative State, and the nanny State. It is not-the-cultural-industries.
This mode is a discovery of the emergent working class at its making, with mutuals, coops, soviets and communes. Proto-socialist associationism ripples on as ‘global civil society’ (with its contradictions, including what Stephen Yeo calls a mode of ‘collectivism’ that had emerged by the turn of the 20th century).
**Modern (trans-modern) commoning ** the curating, stewarding and enjoying by all members, of material or cultural resources - is highlighted by the contemporary movement for commons. Michel Bauwens and the Peer-to-Peer Foundation promote a commons perspective founded in P2P (peer-to-peer) production organisation, which is a discovery of the post-post-Fordist period. P2P asserts the primacy of the mutual sector.
Two associated formations - the Commons Strategies Group and Commons Transition \[Commons Transition xxx] - are more centrally oriented to mutuality in the associationist sense, which differs somewhat from the anarcho-libertarian aesthetic in P2P production of software code. Bauwens is a co-founder of CSG but David Bollier & Silke Helfrich have done the anthropological fieldwork and specifically emphasise **stewarding** as the pivot (of which, the ‘agile’ P2P mode is a somewhat tech-reductionist, geek-elite version) \[Bollier & Helfrich xxx].
Commoning stands in opposition to the enclosing bureaucratising State, the consumerist individualist patriarchal household, the capitalist monetising-enclosing market and colonialist/plantationist appropriation of land and labour. It constitutes the deepest kind of alternative to the status quo of provisioning for subsistence and wellbeing.
**Facilitation** is one of the great political discoveries of the educated baby-boomer, post-Fordist activist generation - an extension of rank-&-file, associationist labour movement activism into community development and disciplined, fluent self-reflection on means and ends.
Facilitation stands for the autodidact and in opposition to preconceptualisation and managerial hierarchy. It’s a close cousin of organic intellectual practice (all of these RoPs here are close kin) but highlights the active cultivating of capability and insight as a skilled, situated practice in its own right. It’s part of the zeitgeist of mid C20 Human Potential, person (child)-centred learning and the ‘reflective practitioner’ aesthetic \[Schõn xxx].
**Participatory design of infrastructure** Communities of participatory design began to develop particularly in the 80s, with precedents in organic-intellectual and facilitative practice, and the free-association traditions, but broadened and deepened; and became more visible with the advent of post-Fordist IT infrastructure, when *entire work-infrastructures* (and later, systems of web ‘platforms’) could be generated from the design office and, later, by hacking.
Participatory design is anti-statist and anti-corporate, and continues to sprout new forms; for example ‘social innovation’ circles as pioneered by Participle \[Participle http://www.participle.net/ xxx], and the design justice movement in the USA.* The movement that promotes strict P2P protocols in web and open apps architecture is a version of participatory design also, but permeated by a hacking aesthetic - which is another thing, I would say, standing in a problematic relationship with ‘design’. Capability in protocolling, however, is fundamentally important in infrastructuring; a concern of the Faculty of stewarding.
All these emergent altered relations of cultural production - that is, production of radical labour power - require instantiation in patterns of landscape §2.
--- Next: A turn to practice