Learning to make society - Hands-on

Here we outline a series of emergent relations of cultural production, over a couple of hundred years. Making a living economy needs to discover how to systematically mobilise all of these, in a radically altered mode of cultural production: a practice of radical knowing.

The central purpose of foprop as a pattern language is to highlight altered relations of production in the practice of making a living economy. In this section we look at altered relations of production in the cultural landscape, in terms of tools for conviviality.

- Organic intellectual practice - Free association, self-organising - Modern (trans-modern) commoning - Facilitation - Participatory design of infrastructure

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The making of capable activist formations and moving beyond fragments involves altered relations of production in culture. We review the range of such patterns that have emerged historically.

These oppositional forms of cultural production have emerged historically in struggles under capitalism, patriarchy, hijacking by professionals, colonisation, extractivism, consumerism, statism and other modes of supremacy. Zone: 3we Landscape: 2culture Family: Dance

Various forms of class practice in the producing and mobilising of knowledges have evolved during Fordism and post-Fordism. Altered relations of production (aRoPs) in this dimension of knowing constitute different cultural formations - activist formations, radical formations, prefigurative formations - with different scopes and different politics. Four RoPs are highlighted.

**Organic intellectual practice** was highlighted for example in the 70s by Illich as ‘vernacular’ capability, in *Tools for conviviality* and *Deschooling society*.

Organic intellectual practice is a discovery of the Fordist era \[Gramsci xxx] which stands in opposition to the professional-managerial class of Fordist and post-Fordist society. Also, in opposition to revolutionary vanguard, priestly caste, bardic elite, etc, and the ‘collectivist’ stream of socialist aesthetics.

**Free association, self-organising** These are highlighted for example by Paulo Freire in his practice of conscientisation, which stands in opposition to the authoritative State, and the nanny State. It is not-the-cultural-industries.

This mode is a discovery of the emergent working class at its making, with mutuals, coops, soviets and communes. Proto-socialist associationism ripples on as ‘global civil society’ (with its contradictions, including what Stephen Yeo calls a mode of ‘collectivism’ that had emerged by the turn of the 20th century).

**Modern (trans-modern) commoning** The curating, stewarding and enjoying by all members, of material or cultural resources - is highlighted by the contemporary movement for commons. Michel Bauwens and the Peer-to-Peer Foundation promote a commons perspective founded in P2P (peer-to-peer) production organisation, which is a discovery of the post-post-Fordist period. P2P asserts the primacy of the mutual sector.

Two associated formations - the Commons Strategies Group and Commons Transition \[Commons Transition xxx] - are more centrally oriented to mutuality in the associationist sense, which differs somewhat from the anarcho-libertarian aesthetic in P2P production of software code. Bauwens is a co-founder of CSG but David Bollier & Silke Helfrich have done the anthropological fieldwork and specifically emphasise **stewarding** as the pivot (of which, the ‘agile’ P2P mode is a somewhat tech-reductionist, geek-elite version) Bollier & Helfrich.

Commoning stands in opposition to the enclosing bureaucratising State, the consumerist individualist patriarchal household, the capitalist monetising-enclosing market and colonialist/plantationist appropriation of land and labour. It constitutes the deepest kind of alternative to the status quo of provisioning for subsistence and wellbeing.

Here we offer a schema for commoning, derived from the commoning pattern language of Bollier & Helfrich.

**Facilitation** is one of the great political discoveries of the educated baby-boomer, post-Fordist activist generation - an extension of rank-&-file, associationist labour movement activism into community development and disciplined, fluent self-reflection on means and ends.

Facilitation stands for the autodidact and in opposition to preconceptualisation and managerial hierarchy. It’s a close cousin of organic intellectual practice (all of these RoPs here are close kin) but highlights the active cultivating of capability and insight as a skilled, situated practice in its own right. It’s part of the zeitgeist of mid C20 Human Potential, person (child)-centred learning and the ‘reflective practitioner’ aesthetic \[Schõn xxx].

**Participatory design of infrastructure** Communities of participatory design began to develop particularly in the 80s, with precedents in organic-intellectual and facilitative practice, and the free-association traditions, but broadened and deepened; and became more visible with the advent of post-Fordist IT infrastructure, when *entire work-infrastructures* (and later, systems of web ‘platforms’) could be generated from the design office and, later, by hacking.

Participatory design is anti-statist and anti-corporate, and continues to sprout new forms; for example ‘social innovation’ circles as pioneered by Participle \[Participle http://www.participle.net/ xxx], and the design justice movement in the USA.* The movement that promotes strict P2P protocols in web and open apps architecture is a version of participatory design also, but permeated by a hacking aesthetic - which is another thing, I would say, standing in a problematic relationship with ‘design’. Capability in protocolling, however, is fundamentally important in infrastructuring; a concern of the Faculty of stewarding.