We are engaged in the making of a living economy. This is no small concern. The hegemonic economy - globalised, capitalist, extractive, enclosed, supremacist and absurdly powerful - is appallingly and recklessly harmful. Here we begin to frame that engagement in a pattern language of activist life and work: a politics of regenetaive production.
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.
# 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 fragnmnts
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.
# We focus on economy 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.
We adopt this rather than rebellion for example, or climate catastrophe, or the reformed heart. These oreintations emerge of course, as we pursue living economy: Resistance Wild commons Deepening capacities of the heart.
We mean a ‘real economy’: - an economy of actual living, lived practices in history and in geographical space, - of use values for actual persons living and yet-unborn, - of wise provision for generations vulnerable, dependent and animated, like ourselves rather than a dead and deathly economy of money, exchange, accumulation, enclosure, private appropriation, oligarchy, supremacy, abuse and violence. Living practices, not structures and functions
We mean a practice of justice and radical inclusion - social, economic and environmental justice - and reparation to those living, for the harms enacted upon their peoples, in colonisation, enclosure and 'development'. This is another of the Seven Rs: Reparation & reconciliation.
We also mean ecologies: human and more-than-human entities (organic and inorganic, people and stuff, collectives and populations, animal, vegatable and mineral), in plural, intimate, mycelial webs of responsive, evolving, dynamic, living, mutualised relationship.
We engage ecologically, for example, through these frames: - 110 Living gracefully within the doughnut - More-than-human relations - 180 Transverse practice, weaving pluriverse - 210 Breathing in wild nature - the common life systems of a green-blue planet - 2B0 Prosthesis & symbiosis - Healthy, unhealthy & inescapable dependence on stuff - 4B0 Deep time, life time, sufficiency
# Economy is living practices, not structures and functions - certainly, not money Just to emphasise this: we address an economy as a living-and-lived constellation of practices (people and people and non-human creatures and stuff, interdependent, in mutual relations). Not a system of stuff - let alone, the dead, merely exploitable, disposable stuff of the hegemonic economy.
Anyway, ‘stuff’ is highly active, including for example stuff that is alive (for example, the human gut biome) and stuff (eg an ocean) that is enormously dynamic and impactful. But also stuff like documents and machines and softwares which, as ‘actants’, bring complex order of one kind and another to practice - even if not necessarily the order that ‘we’ meant them to bring.
The pattern language that we aim to evolve is not a system of abstract functions or structures, but a repertoire of prompts that can be ‘sung’ and ‘danced’ into everyday life and work, in the moment, persistently, intelligently, locally: as a collective practice of rescue, resistance, reporting, re-weaving, reparation, regenerative activism and regime change - Seven Rs of mutual sector commitment.
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