A basic question in language(ing) of struggle is: what is an activist life-world made up of? That is: what are we in relationships with, and what kinds of skill does this call upon? We take here the view that, as activists, we're engaged in radically altering relations of production, in all spheres. Relations of production determine the 'shape' and articulation and dynamics of forces of production (again, in all spheres). This orientation gives rise to the acronym foprop: Forces of production, relations of production.
We understand forces of production (FoPs) as **constellations of practices** that are materially - practically - organised by historically distinctive, hegemonic relations of production (RoPs). Such constellations of practices are substantially, historically transformed when their RoPs are altered.
# Relations of production - Expanded In each of three landscapes of practice, RoPs are particular to those particular kinds of materials and forces. Landscapes of practice
- Material landscape - §1 is organised by RoPs (and complexes of RoPs) like: wage labour, private ownership of property, universalised commodity production and exchange, extraction, rent, capital, fiefdom, indigenous stewardship, royal prerogative, etc.
- Cultural landscape - §2 is organised by RoPs (and complexes of RoPs) like: a professional-managerial class, a priestly elite, organic intellectuality, digitalisation, print and print literacy, scribe reproduction, schooling, vernacular capability, civil mass action, caste, preconceptualisation, divine utterance, etc.
- Aesthetic landscape - §3 is organised by RoPs (and complexes of RoPs) like: individualism, accumulation and greed, violence and appropriation, essentialism and eternalism, Othering, tribal affiliation and antagonism, kinship, racism, partiarchy, white supremacy, taboo, cargo cult, divine rights or promises, untouchability, mutuality, moderation, gracefulness, suchness, equanimity, mettā, etc.
# Pattern language
Here we develop the principle that in the foprop pattern language of making a living economy, each pattern frames a substantial practical alteration - and thus a resolution (perhaps local, perhaps more general) - of some clash of RoPs, in the ordering of some larger or smaller constellation of FoPs: a piece of the living historical fabric of life and work.
When RoPs are durably transformed in sufficient pieces of fabric, an altered mode of production (ultimately, of *society*) is prefigured. Previously **dominant** RoPs have been moved to the margins - become **residual**; **emergent** RoPs have become hegemonic.
The diversity of RoPs across the three §landscapes means that **plural modes of rigour** are involved in visioning and weaving transformative practice (and thus in evolving and mobilising patterns). Notably, the particular rigour of recognising and orchestrating multiple firms of rigour(s) is central. See Pattern & rigour
# Forces of production - Expanded Forces of production (FoP) refers to the totality of historical practices in some practical sphere: a community, an economy, a region, a sector; a genre, a tradition, a cultural or economic formation. A constellaion of forces of production is a piece of the **mundane fabric** of practices woven together in **everyday living and working**.
We are concerned to rigorously and practically understand how FoPs are organised and cultivated, woven and transformed. We are engaged here in **theory of practice**, although necessarily we are engaged - first, last and always - in practice. Theory-of-practice is a practice, of course!
**FoP** and **RoP** - are constructs adopted from historical materialism/Marxism. In that tradition they apply to the commonplace domain of (extractive, liberal-individualist, capitalist) economics - the ‘dead’ landscapes of money, abstract markets, abstract value, commodity exchange, financial calculus, buildings and machinery, materials of production, etc. In the context of the **making a living economy**, however, they are taken much further: into all three landscapes of practice, into **cultural materialist** territory and beyond.
The 'beyond' here is especially constituted in the §3 Aesthetic landscape. Cultural materialism has been concerned with 'culture' and specifically with the making of 'a common culture' within the modernist 'long revolution' of democracy. But making a living economy engages also with the need - manifest in our present lifetimes - for transformation of **the heart mind** and transformative struggles (radically altered relations of production) in **the emotional commons** too: displacing supremacies, Otherings, forms of violence and all essentialisms - notably the universalism carried by 'the modern' and weaponised by capital in globalisation, colonisation and the most primitive, extractive forms of accumulation at the expense of all the Planet's species.
Extended in this way, descriptions of FoPs and altered RoPs engage not with abstract **forms**, but with **formations** of activist practice and the deepest **forces** of humans' affiliation and motivation, in cultivating the skills that activists need to mobilise in practice, in dances of radical transformation.
Rather than 'economics', this expanded frame is the frame of making the living economy; and of **living the making**, in an actual life, one breath at a time. We move first from 'economics' to 'organising'.
This site holds a draft article 'in conversation with' Robin Murray, and a review of related constructs and projects, including a Trellis Foundation project for 'a college of conviviality'. It amounts to an exploration of **the practice of theory**.
And then, engaging with the in-here landscape of the heart mind, in care work, moves us beyond 'organising' in its traditional senses, into radical singing-and-dancing and living-into-being of a **pluriversal** weave of profoundly transformed forces of production-of-lives: now, and into the futurity of the lives that may be lived by the grandchildren's grandchildren.