It’s time to shift ground, take a different tack. In my lifetime, and for generations of modern life, skill has been *a ground of struggle*.
I was born and brought up in a declining manufacturing town - machine tools, confectionery; above all, worsted textiles and carpets - and all the work I knew of (and all the work my parents and grandparents knew of) was ‘manual’ work, in manufacturing and extractive industries, and in muscle-based services, the movement of goods and people. Through my childhood, my father trained himself to be ‘a skilled man’ and I took it naturally - meritocratic baby-boomer that I was - that acquiring skills and exercising them was what people aspired to do.
I eagerly did it myself in the arena of ‘mental work’ and, without realising it, was ushered into a class (an engineer) and an era (of ‘productivity’ and determination to end ‘restrictive practices’ defended by traditionalist craft unions) in which the work of people like me - qualified people, ‘office’ workers, people of book learning, people who were ‘middle management’ rather than ’shop floor’ - was to undermine and minimise the necessity and market value of the skills that people like my father had invested their identity in. They had been going on in the 60s when I got my first job, in collective-bargaining battles over ’restrictive' practices, but in the 70s and 80s I found myself, politicised, in the midst of struggles over ‘deskilling’ and ‘structural unemployment’ and the disappearance of jobs and ways of working that would never reappear.
This division between skill and manual labour had been in existence for a long time. Marx pointed out the capacity of humans to think about production first, and then to execute it; he wrote of this as the difference between ‘the worst of architects’ and ‘the best of bees’. But even in his times, the social distinction and the practical division between architect and *labourer* was deeply established: since Brunelleschi for example, with his masterful and secret design for the Duomo in Florence.
Hierarchical divisions of labour and labour-status were taken for granted, even within guilds and craft communities (thus, for example, the common perceptions of ‘labour aristocracy’, and awareness in my teens of gradations of class in a novel like Neville Shute’s *Trustee from the toolroom*, whose central character was a man of my father’s ilk). In my own childhood the majority of labour - and of the population around me - was considered to be ‘unskilled’. But I was innocent in this, and felt that my own trajectory into the class of designers was a path of skill basically similar to my father’s; and an honourable one.
My own sense of mastery - knowing what to do and how to do it, having an intimate relationship with materials and objects, solving problems of design and execution alike - seemed to me like my dad's, even down to our relationship with books and drawings and hand tools and machine tools. Thus, when the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards’ combine committee began to campaign in the 1970s for production of socially useful products grounded in ‘the skills, knowledge and creativity’ of ordinary working people', this practice was so obviously meaningful that it needed not a moment’s thought to align with the campaign. Lucas Aerospace shop stewards committee
By that time (mid-70s) I had begun to recognise that my core interest was not in engineered artefacts but in forms of work and knowledge, and the relationships between people - and relationship between people and their skills, knowledge and creativity (their knowledges, their labour-powers) - that are enabled and attenuated or prohibited in particular formations of industrial work. But I hadn’t quite twigged that I had moved out of the arena of traditional skills and into one that, in this present book, I refer to by the term *literacies*. I had moved into the world(s) of the page, and the word and the equation and the story and the report and the poem on the page, and was no longer in either the manual working class or the class of artisans; certainly not ‘clerical and secretarial’ (which was ‘women’s work) or ‘nursing and auxiliary’ (women’s also). I was ‘managerial and technical’; I had emerged from an escalator of education in the professional-managerial class (the PMC).
As the 70s progressed I learned that the work of the PMC is to produce the organisation of the work of others: wage workers (through design and supervision and strategy) and non-wage workers (through education for example, and through the setting of guidelines as in ‘domestic science’). These were mid-twentieth century literacies rather than traditional skills, primarily concerned with representations of and interventions in communities rather than with material things; they were about the organisation and purposes of collectives, and the deep-laid objective and subjective relationships of people within them: economic and cultural (and as I later understood, emotional) institutions.
Ivan Illich was pivotal, with his passionate, conservative appeal for the reinstatement of vernacular forms in the face of professionalised modes of economic and cultural reproduction and mandatory (typically State-enforced) participation in professionally mediated ‘services’ (public health care, public education, public administration, urban development, etc). Illich