Here we look at the historical emergence of relations of activist production in the cultural landscape, as seen from the baby-boomer generation.
My perception of radical professionalism emerged simultaneously from theorisations and from participating in formations; this itself is probably a characteristic of this historical movement in this emergent class-fraction. The theorisations of emergent practice included, diversely . .
- 70s’ accounts like Gorz on ‘the new working class’ and the Ehrenreichs on ‘the professional-managerial class’ \[Gorz xxx, Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich xxx]
- broadly post-colonial projects of radical literacy like Freire and Illich \{Freire xxx, Illich xxx}, and
- my own historical investigation \[Hales 1978, *Operational research and the forces of production - A Marxist analysis of science and ideology* xxx] of an inter-war ‘Left scientists’ movement in Britain. (JD Bernal was a prominent figure \[Werskey 2007]). This 'progressive' movement evolved into post-war managerialist, neo-Fabian formations in ‘management science’ and the management of innovation (the kinds of phenomenon which, within socialist culture, Stephen Yeo tags as its ‘collectivist’ streams \[Yeo xxx, *Three socialisms*]).
The 70s’ radical-professional formations included . . - radical science, radical philosophers, radical economists, radical educators, radical midwives, radical planners, radical technology and many other self-designated radical movements; - the campaign around the forces of production in Lucas Aerospace and other rank-&-file trade union ‘alternative strategy’ ventures; but most immediately - a distributed community of workers in British trade-union and community research and information centres (including law centres) such as Leeds TUCRIC and Coventry Workshop (which latter arose from an important Home Office-funded anti-poverty programme, the Community Development Project \[CDP xxx]). In the USA, similar forces and facilitative aesthetics were at work, for example in the formation of the Highlander Folk School during the Depression, which during the 50s and into the 60s (as Highlander College) schooled a significant cohort of leaders and pioneers in the civil rights movement.
This latter ‘community development’ culture was significantly and self-consciously mobilised in the Industry and Employment formation at the GLC in the 80s, in the popular planning unit and the community development unit, alongside the academic Left economists who might have been more conventionally obvious recruits. At the Enterprise Board (the GLC’s investment bank) this culture of facilitative process was sometimes dismissively referred to as ‘the sociologists at the GLC’, but its exclusion from the bank was one of the latter’s errors of self-identification, I think.
This had consequences, for example, in the tech-centredness and lack of direction of most of the Technology Networks that were founded on an awkward adaptation of the Lucas stewards' ‘product’ vision.
By the time the 80s’ GLC adventure was under way, I was very aware (as manifest in 1980’s LTW) that a genre and a skillset of rank-&-file *facilitation* was emergent, among formally educated young people who might otherwise be expected to be climbing corporate ladders. This resonated too, with strands of practice more corporately oriented and professionalist, originating in a preceding generation, like ‘action research’, and ‘behaviour in groups’ in organisation development (arising jointly in the 40s and 50s in the US - eg Kurt Lewin - and at the Tavistock Institute in Britain).
I felt, and continue to feel, that this culture of **skilled facilitative capability and intention**, in support of the self-making and self-organising of formations of ‘ordinary working people’, is one of the great political-cultural innovations of the post-war, education-boom, activist generation; and that it has a lot of legs, still. Broadening this out, I have a sense of a family of emergent altered relations of production, in the field of cultural production, over a period of 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.