**From organising to economics!** The practice that the college is *for* isn’t merely a world of the mind: critical conceptualising, radical storytelling. This is a labour-process politics, a **politics of production**.
This means that a basic bottleneck is *livelihood* and the body . . access to the means of *sustaining the living labour* - the mobilising of labour-power - of the college-commons.
A huge amount of work is predicated by the college: - the time it takes to curate pattern-language commons; - the time it takes to rigorously derive pattern, in dialogue with radical practice past and current; - the time it takes to steward multiple commons-of-commons, and to mobilise formacion in the production of dual power.
Back in the 80s’ GLC, attempting to be realistic about ‘popular planning’ and the contribution of what is now sometimes called ‘the partner state’, in the era of an emergent ‘knowledge economy’, I felt it necessary to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much labour time *for labour* would be needed, in London, to match the labour of knowing-and-organising that capital routinely mobilises each week. It was a tough calculation to do, and crude, but I was shocked to find it coming out at **35 million hours** of prime work time, *each week* \[Hales 1982 xxx *Paid to think - Professional workers in London*].
On this basis, the school of Livelihood and contribution has a fundamental contribution to make in the college.
This is where ‘grant funded’ finally finds its place, and bites hard. In DaO, Robin chose - something of a slip, in a politics of **production** - to frame the ‘four economies’ in terms of their funding, rather than the relations of *production* under which their practice is organised, and the altered, prefigurative relations of production of a ‘new’ economy. The mutual sector was thus easily misrecognised as a minority NGO sector or ‘the third sector’ of the Big Society (‘the mixed economy’), rather than as the **entire**, enormous cultural, economic and aesthetic force of global civil society, and ‘the world’s largest movement’ of blessed unrest.
Nevertheless, whatever the emergent relations of production are in the dual-power making of a living economy, the practices that enable labour-power to be mobilised and sustained in formacion, by actual people living actual lives, are pivotal.
This is where we cycle back, from organising to ‘economics’! The political economy of contribution in the college is fundamental.
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