In the opening two parts I've been framing, and addressing Robin. In these next three sections I’ll take a different tack. Rather than inquiring into Robin’s modes, I’ll draw on my own background in labour-process perspective-taking, and develop some conceptualisations.
During the 70s, and maintained and evolved since, I adopted a focus on ‘knowledge work’ within the broader development of what we now can see as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism.
I have a background as a chemical-process design engineer, a sometime employee of and action-researcher in multinational corporations, and an activist within the ‘radical science’ movement (a founder member of the *Radical Science Journal* editorial collective). Against this background, the labour-process focus that seemed essential - as an organiser, a developer of radical, prefigurative alternative practices - was on the work of what, in the 70s, was beginning to be identified as ‘the professional-managerial class’ (PMC), and the politics of work in-and-against the PMC.
In the 80s, at the GLC (Greater London Council: Robin was Head of Industry and Employment there) this meant beginning to reckon with what was being called a ‘knowledge economy’ and with the differing opportunities and challenges for organising presented by the spread of (workplace) infrastructures of digital means - notably, the possibility of ‘infrastructuring’ as an emergent mode of design, which might be conducted in a participatory way by the users of digital tools, generating a repertoire of ‘tools for conviviality’. Ivan Illich
The approach to formaciòn developed in this present chapter was powerfully inflected by the important initiative, in the 70s, of the Lucas Aerospace joint shop stewards \[Lucas Plan, Breaking the Frame xxx] within a broader movement of rank-&-file workers’ planning and workers’ enquiries. This had a profound influence on my own activist choices as an engineer, but took the form of a focus on the production of ’workers’ knowledge’ and work infrastructures, rather than particular (consumer) products: it was the cultural practice of *knowing* and infrastructuring that seemed more fundamental, as distinct from the capability to create ‘good widgets’.
# Material provisioning, cultural production, the skill of ordinary people This reflects a difference of emphasis: less on the *material provisioning* of means of subsistence and wellbeing (as in the Lucas Plan - also perhaps in the sectoral strategies of the GLC) - and more on the production of *capability to know and to organise*.
> Specifically, to organise the formations that might be capable of knowing the right things, to produce the right widgets, under the right economic forms (relations of production of ’ploughshares’, for example, rather than ‘swords’).
I also was sceptical, and remain so, of reliance on ‘the skill, knowledge and creativity of ordinary working people’ and the way this slid with embarrassing ease, in practice, into a reliance on *professionals* with highly specialised education and work experience (which had been a large part of the character of the militant Lucas engineering *design* workforce in the first place). As regards making a living economy, one manifest issue is the recurrence of dumb, wilfully ignorant, small, harsh, self-aggrandising, habitual-addictive, tribal, supremacist, etc etc behaviours of ordinary working people.
This calls, I am sure, for a whole lot more attention, and more than a humanistic populism, as the basis of a living-economy politics. Both this kind of ‘aesthetic’ issue, and the focus on formaciòn as well as material provisioning, have important contributions to make in shaping the framework below, of a curriculum for a college of activist literacy.
--- But to begin: we need to frame how to address ‘forces of production’ of all kinds - aesthetic and cultural, as well as material - as *a weave of practices* under radically altered relations of production.
Topics in this section: - Three landscapes of-and-in practice - Forces of production - A weave of practices - Describing a landscape - The weft of a conceptual weave - Radically altered relations of production - Provisioning - The scope of material stuff - Warp - Zones of reach and the scope of an activist life - Schools in the Faculty of subsistence work
DOT FROM preview-next-diagram STATIC strict digraph { rankdir=LR node [style=filled fillcolor=lightyellow] "Provisioning - The scope of material stuff" node [style=filled fillcolor=lightblue] node [style=filled fillcolor=white] "Provisioning - The scope of material stuff" -> "Transgressive and cyborg means" "Provisioning - The scope of material stuff" -> "Digital means and the Golemic" "Provisioning - The scope of material stuff" -> "Primary attention in the real economy" "Provisioning - The scope of material stuff" -> "Transgressive and cyborg means" "Provisioning - The scope of material stuff" -> "Machineries of intermediation" "Provisioning - The scope of material stuff" -> "Warp - Zones of reach and the scope of an activist life" "Transgressive and cyborg means" "Transgressive and cyborg means" -> "Digital means and the Golemic" "Digital means and the Golemic" "Primary attention in the real economy" "Primary attention in the real economy" -> "Wild nature, domestic economy, digital means" "Primary attention in the real economy" -> "Wild nature and the Anthropocene" "Primary attention in the real economy" -> "Domesticated economy and capitalisms" "Primary attention in the real economy" -> "Digital means and the Golemic" "Primary attention in the real economy" -> "Transgressive and cyborg means" "Primary attention in the real economy" -> "Machineries of intermediation" "Transgressive and cyborg means" "Transgressive and cyborg means" -> "Digital means and the Golemic" "Machineries of intermediation" "Warp - Zones of reach and the scope of an activist life" "Warp - Zones of reach and the scope of an activist life" -> "4 A dance of knowing - Theory-of-practice"}