There are three emphases here within a politics of labour process, all of which were present in the 70s and figured, for example, in the work I brought to my 1980 *Living Thinkwork - Where do labour processes come from?* (LTW) \[Hales 1980 xxx].
First, **provision and access of material means of subsistence and wellbeing**. Broadly, this might be seen as a frame of use value economy; I’ll call it *subsistence work* - the kind of orientation at the heart of the Lucas politics, or present day politics of social care or ecological wellbeing, for example. It’s the world I participated in as a chemical engineer, designing production infrastructure for chemicals manufacture.
This frame extends also to various ‘machineries’: of exchange (for example, alternative moneys), logistical provision (operations management in supply chains), and of (legal) rights and means of *access* to provision. This is a frame of material and machine *forms*, operating with the forceful ‘suchness’ of material stuff.
Second, **‘cultural’ production**: capability in knowing, visioning, communicating and organising - and crucially, organising in order that the necessary knowing and capability *becomes possible*. I’ll call this a frame of *formaciòn work*, at the centre of which is the producing and mobilising of labour powers, organised in radically capable *formations*.
And third, **’structures of feeling’** \[Williams ref xxx]: the production of ‘aesthetic’ affiliations and orientations, intentions and perceptions - the production of ‘the heart-mind’ and the responses that are made, ‘in-here’, in an ocean of other in-heres, ‘out-there’.
This clearly calls for different skills and modes, conceptualisations and narratives, than the overt and intentional activities of ‘cultural’ production, as I’m using that label here.
This is complex stuff - not least because one of the ways we typically use ‘culture’ is as a term to invoke what I’m here choosing to call instead a landscape of ’aesthetic’ *forces*, in the body, in the preconscious. There is, I’m sure, a need to make that distinction: the practices involved have quite distinct characteristics.
This third landscape has been referred to as ‘moral economy’ \[Thompson xxx]. It concerns whose buttons (in the *preconscious*) are being pushed? by whom? with what intended and unwitting outcomes? In LTW this was tagged as ‘time and emotion study’. It was hard to go further with this at that time, even with the radical, generational, feminist insight that the personal is political . . > . . what does ‘personal’ mean, exactly? > . . under what circumstances is ‘the personal’ a *transformative* rather than conservative force or resource? > . . in what ways are such structures of feeling and their mobilisations *produced* - and *differently* produced, generating radically *altered* lives and altered times, under radically altered relations of production?
These remain difficult questions and necessarily so, but the means of engaging them are much more fully developed today, I feel. ‘Identity politics’ contributes (in contradictory ways), as do emergent civil-society capabilities in reparation and reconciliation, non-violent mass action \[Hawken 2007 Blessed unrest xxx]; as also do secular ‘mindfulness’ traditions and evolutionary neuropsychology \[Damasio xxx; Hanson xxx; Bristow & Bell 2020 xxx]. And so on. So, this aesthetic landscape is, at this time, quite plainly up for inclusion in a materialist politics of labour process: of emotional labour.
I’ll call this a frame of *care work*, which is distinct in its requirements from subsistence work and formaciòn work but inescapably and necessarily, intimately interwoven with them - in practice *as such*. It is, for example, where the practices of *valuing*, that inform ‘use value’ or ‘social usefulness’, get done: tacitly or explicitly, skilfully or carelessly, for sameness and conservatism or for liberation and humane plurality.
**Three landscapes, all always present in practice, per se** The framing of a curriculum for making a living economy calls for framings of all three modes - subsistence work, formaciòn work, care work, as radical, transformative practice; and also of the ‘dance’ in which they mutually interweave and are interwoven, in the moment-to-moment, year-to-year conduct of an activist life.
Above, I’ve described the three landscapes in narrative mode: as the contingent, individual, emergent perception and life-experience of a labour-process activist. But I’m proposing understanding in this mode as a generic, rigorous, conceptual-practical container for theory of practice; that is, *lived practice* of activist life. All practice inescapably lives in all three landscapes, all the time.
Likewise, a living economy, as fabric of practice, is constructed, curated, enjoyed and stewarded in all three. Thus, practice across this entire range must fall within the scope of the college and its language-of-practice, and within the scope of activist life and work - the expansive, breathing, animated literacy and skill - that the college aspires to.
The frame is rich (what else would it be, for a living economy?!) and large, too large to develop here. So here in this section I’ll offer just the following: - A framing of forces of production as a *weave of practices*. Forces of production - A weave of practices - What’s involved in Describing a landscape - The weft of a conceptual weave - forming the basis of a curriculum of *real economy*. The three landscapes frame the *materiality* of a practice of making the living economy. - A highlight on Radically altered relations of production - aRoPs - as the constitutive aspect of ‘new’ economy and historical transformation. - Leaving aside for the moment the cultural and aesthetic landscapes: more detail on the material landscape, regarding the provisioning of *material stuff* of diverse kinds, in a living economy that serves the grandchildren’s grandchildren as well as those presently living. Provisioning - The scope of material stuff - Brief characterisation of four *zones of reach* that constitute the warp of the conceptual weave. These zones are the basis of the faculty structure of the college. They frame the *scope* of an activist, or activist formation. Warp - Zones of reach and the scope of an activist life
I’ll refer to the weave as the **foprop** weave: forces of production, relations of production.
The foprop weave is a container for a collection of patterns that constitute a pattern language, and the pattern language - pattern language(ing) - is the work of the college. >As a shorthand and for explicitness, in what follows, the symbol § - pronounced ‘landscape’ - signifies that one of the three landscapes is being invoked.