We are engaged in the making of a living economy. Here we begin to frame that engagement in a pattern language of activist life and work: a politics of regenerative production.
This is no small concern. The hegemonic economy - globalised, capitalist, extractive, enclosed, supremacist and absurdly powerful - is appallingly and recklessly harmful.
Forces of colonisation, and fundamentalist purity and supremacy (variously statist, racist-ethnic, religious, etc) generate ane enact violence of many kinds. Intentions of boundless accumulation result in recurrent crisis, grotesque accumulations of personal wealth and power, and profoundly destructive extraction from ecosystems and cultures, leading to death and exctinction: ecocides, epistemicides, genocides.
Intending this to be a practical engagement with all necessary means of subsistence and wellbeing for human beings, in living, we take ‘economy’ as our core focus.
# In clear and present danger Continued life of our own species and very many other species, with any kind of ease, is in clear and present danger. Thus, in activism, in the global mutual sector, we urgently direct our attention to the making of a Living economy: durable across the span of human lifetimes, sufficiently comfortable for very many living species, radically open to the vernacular contribution and enjoying and stewarding of ordinary people in their ordinary living and working, organised as a practice oriented to the ease of living of our grandchildren’s grandchildren.
Our responses as activists in the global mutual sector - what Paul Hawken 2007 celebrated as ‘blessed unrest’ - are, thankfully, diverse and plural. At the same time, this gives us problems, because as we get more deeply practically engaged with the world (which, in its materiality, is diverse too!) we tend to get into cultural and local and maybe political or aesthetic silos. This gives rise to an intention to move Beyond fragments. Movement beyond fragments
To scope and facilitate the challenging practice of moving beyond fragments, we deploy a frame of 'Seven Rs' of mutual sector commitment. ‘Clear and present danger’, as tagged above, is the keynote of one of these Rs, the most primitive: Rescue. Seven Rs of mutual sector commitment Rescue
Here we develop means of visioning and facilitating pluriversal relations in making a living economy. A framing of 'seven Rs' of activist commitment underpins a commitment to design justice in the cultivation of infrastructure and tools, and to social justice in the evolution of living economy.
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