Having lived since the 80s with a sense of the ‘fragments’ challenge, but in professional-managerial domains of corporate work-infrastructure and participatory design, I’ve found myself up against versions of this that are new for me as I’ve engaged in these most recent years with Robin’s worlds of civil-society activism, of trade and market cooperativism, and the centrality and *diversity* of a radical, oppositional, creative ‘mutual sector’.
I realise, I’ve tended to take the mutual sector for granted, since I became a self-aware member of it in the 70s, on the trailing end of a post-war period of rank-&-file identity and confidence. But now, returning to a more intimate engagement at another time, I find myself contemplating new versions of the requirement to *construct* solidarity, class, formations.
As I meet ‘solidarity economy’ formations - in their unfortunate entanglement with ‘social economy’ and ‘social innovation’ visions, for example
> or . . the movement of the squares, 15-M and Occupy; or > the excellent ‘roots organiser’ quarterly of the CTRLshift movement, *Stir to Action*; or > the revived fashion for coops (and digitally-tooled platform coops) as a small-enterprise key to local regeneration or a bid to escape from precarious work > etc
. . I observe these to be fragments, tunnelled visions that seem to take “all together now” with some kind of obviousness, as if mutuality, solidarity and social justice were simple. Or maybe, as if there were an invisible hand that required no mutuality at all, just private property, the State and . . spirited opposition.
I find myself forced to recognise that my own commitment as an activist in the mutual sector, arising in a particular (Marxian, labour-process, revolutionary, socialist) tradition and for a particular (melancholic) temperament, differs from those of others, and that these differences produce not only fragmentation of attention and intention but can also - regrettably and ‘naturally’ - generate responses of disregard, disdain, dismissal. I acknowledge this in myself, as a shameful thing. But not sneering at 'lesser' ambitions - which are simply differently-human and differently-incomplete commitments - can be hard sometimes; needs watching-for. Brotherliness and solidarity are not guaranteed in an average human; I regard myself as an average human in all my particularity.
This is way short of sectarianism, of the kind that Margaret Killjoy explores in 'The lower left' \[Killjoy 2018 xxx] but it certainly underpins degrees of dissociation and siloing. And thus it is that I’ve needed to construct for myself some kind of map of the range of radical, absorbing, enormous commitments within the mutual sector.
My ‘container’ (in a psychoanalytic as well as analytic sense?) for such commitments is ‘Six Rs’, six **structures of feeling**, all of which warrant recognition and regard even if they are also ‘fragments’, and any of which can consume an entire lifetime of activist commitment - which, de facto, is a silo.
These Six Rs are: - *Rescue & respite* - A passionate movement of the heart for the succour and defence of people (and non-humans) under immediately present threat to their life, livelihood and comfort, from forces of **fiat**, which must be nullified with *matching* fiat. *It mobilises in response to refugees for example, manifests in food banks, in ‘deep green’ actions, in earthquake or tsunami responses.*
- *Resistance* - Locally, in a knowable community, establishing a regime of basic alternative means of subsistence and wellbeing under self-determination and through mutual aid, free in some degree from dominant economic and cultural hegemonies, but on the verge of **poverty**, destitution, crushed liberty. *It appears in urban farms, food networks, unions, coops; water struggles, responses to ongoing clear-felling, mono-cultural plantation-ism, indigenous fights against oil extraction and the spoil of oil extraction.*
- *Reporting & recording* - Bringing **’news from elsewhere'** . . of how life, resistance and revolution are and were (in history) being conducted, how rescue is and was required, how means were and are mobilised, how reparation and reconciliation are being enacted and were achieved. *It appears in investigative journalism and blogging, oral histories, NGOs like Greenpeace or Amnesty.*
- *Re-weaving* - Intentionally, prefiguratively, assembling a ’new social economy', an operational ecology of use-value **provisioning**. *Understood for example to comprise coop startups, community enterprises and B-corps, regional food networks, ‘partner State’ collaborations, circular flows of material and energy ‘within the doughnut’, infrastructures of free software and un-surveilled communications, fair trade, democratic money, community land trusts, peer-to-peer production and exchange.*
- *Reparation & reconciliation* - Securing social (and environmental, and generational, and trans-species; etc) justice, and giving - in fair and full compensation for what has been taken and been refused - under juridical and moral principles. *Levelling of playing fields. Mutualising hearts that have been profoundly, historically Othered. Achieving pluriverse under uneven development.**
- *Revolution & regime change and re-ontologising* - The fully aware construction of an alternative mode of production. *Ubiquitous ’commoning’, I would say, myself. Whatever . . involving confrontation with and material alternatives to the dominant mode and its constitutive relations, a tangle of dominant, residual and emergent forms, formations in contradiction, radically uneven development and plurality; possibly, retaliatory violence, certainly, profound risk.*
How are so many threads to be woven, without collapses into sectarianism, disdain, pragmatic blinkering, warfare separately conducted by squads ‘in trenches’, silos? Any of these aesthetic commitments could be an entire life. How is solidarity (coherence, mutuality) to be achieved as a practical fact, rather than projected as a warm (or hot) burst of sentiment?
The diversity of such structures of feeling in the mutual sector figures centrally - but tacitly - in Robin’s ‘new social economy’, with its ‘social’ values. But in DaO this is badly mis-identified as a ‘grant funded economy’. Only a small part of activity in the mutual sector is conducted under explicit funding, let alone grants: and historically, the mutual sector has always been far more than an *economic* phenomenon, or a waged one. Indeed, what is being ‘waged’ in the mutual sector is more characteristically a *war*, than ‘a fair day’s work’.
The nature of this is better recognised - under Mary Kaldor’s prompting I think - in Robin’s subsequent 2012 framing as ‘civil economy’, an aspect of *global civil society* \[Murray 2012 xxx]. Without drawing the four-economy diagram from DaO (see above xxx), in this (brief) presentation in *The global civil society yearbook* (GCSY) he positions ‘the grant funded’ quadrant of that map, oppositionally, as: ‘global rather than national, civil not the state and corporation, society not the individualism of the late consumer market’. Shifting attention from economics to organising, he cites: > the innumerable campaigns that have multiplied since globalisation took hold in the 1980s. Like the Chartists, they are contesting the new order politically. Alongside the Chartists, there was also a movement to develop a civil economic challenge . . . This civil economy was sidelined in the twentieth century, as the state took over many of its functions. But the last thirty years has seen its re-emergence side by side with the advance of globalisation and as a distinct strand in the development of global civil society.
and he notes: > a surge of initiatives by those marginalised by the market. Some are defending an existing way of life in the face of a liberalised market, like the peasant farmer co-operatives and credit unions that have grown so rapidly since the mid 1990s. Others are trying to create a new one - in fishing villages that have lost their fish, or towns their industries . . . or whole regions – even countries – whose economies have hit the road blocks of IMF austerity . .
In this context ‘organising’, and the multiple *formations* of global civil society - and their multiplicity - are brought to the front. In a sense this is unsurprising, since one definition of global civil society exactly mirrors the ‘four sectors’ mapping of DaO: > Global civil society: the sphere of ideas, values, institutions, organisations, networks, and individuals located between the family, the state, and the market and operating beyond the confines of national societies, polities, and economies’ \[Anheier et al. 2001: 17]
But with the difference that, in the GCSY context, it is struggles for justice (including livelihood-justice, reparation-justice, environment-justice, safe-space justice, non-human species justice) that constitute the frame: global civil society being mobilised and constituted by . . > \[a] dynamic of claims and counterclaims for justice that extends far beyond the discursive frame of the conventional nation state . . \[Albrow and Seckinelgin 2011: 1]
Roughly contemporary with Robin’s ‘new economy’ storytelling, and the valuable stocktaking and ‘news from elsewhere’ of the GCSY series (2002-2012), there is Paul Hawken’s inspiring and insightful invocation of very many global formations of **‘blessed unrest’**, which he tags ‘the largest movement in the world’ \[Hawken 2007 xxxx]. But Hawken - like Robin, even in the ‘civil economy’ formulation I think - offers nothing that justifies a description of multiple formations as *a movement*; except for ‘values’ of a certain tendency, and their presumed or projected ’sharing’.
Some see this as ‘a movement’, and others experience it as fragmentation; some see ‘sharing’ and others, multiplicity. Whichever: this degree of difference in perception calls for a frame in which *both* are accounted for in patterns of response, and ways of *weaving both* - in practice - are described.
I simply can’t see a ‘turn to values’ as furnishing any means of globally, regionally or even locally organising; just an idealist rhetoric, a technics of sentimentalist button-pushing. Rather, I need to see a description of practical means of achieving *aesthetic* commons, commons of *the heart-mind*: curating-making them and mobilising-enjoying them, in truly diverse, inescapably plural, truly differing and sometimes mutually incomprehensible or painful ways, alongside Others who will remain Other.
Rather than presuming an all-embracing universe of value sharing, there is a need to map ways in which practice can be carefully, skilfully, modestly ‘transverse’ - a construct developed by Cynthia Cockburn and feminist allies, in cross-community conflicts \[Cockburn, Hunter, Mulholland, Patel 1999 xxx].