Work in progress @ nov2019 on a chapter for 'A book for Robin' (Robin Murray). This is a quick fly-through, drafted as the script of a 10-minute presentation. Appended 'notes' will be deployed when writing the full version.
This is part of one of the foprop projects.
**foprop** = forces of production, relations of production. The project has five streams of work in progress, oriented to the conduct of a transformational **activist life**, and making **a Living Economy** of **P2P-commons**.
---
These are the sections of the chapter . .
In *Danger & opportunity* (2009) Robin offered a mapping of four 'blobs' - four economies - as the framework for further thinking about 'the new social economy'. One of these blobs - called by Robin 'the grant-funded economy' - seemed puzzling: familiar but at the same time hard to recognise. This chapter is an investigation of it.
- **The four blobs**
Robin's map of four 'grand sectors' in DaO - he called them four 'economies' - looks tantalisingly simple and helpful. But I quickly began to puzzle over 'the grant economy'. I intuitively recognised this sector from a lifetime of my own activism, some of it shared with Robin and others in this present network . .
Starting with Robin's 'blob map' in DaO, I'll develop a revised, more explicitly conceptualised version, which turns out to be a mapping of **regimes of provision and access** in **the material economy**.
- **The mutual sector**
Like the other regimes tagged in the blob map - not least, the State - the mutual sector is complex, existing not only in the dimension of material production, but also in cultural and aesthetic landscapes. I have a sense that 'the fourth blob' can't be properly understood except as essentially - constitutively - a constellation of **cultural** as well as material production. This section sketches the range, and the plurality.
Turning now to my sense of the 4th blob as a sector of **cultural production** as distinct from material production (which is the aspect that Robin majors on in DaO). This is closely linked to some fundamental processes in the evolving of **class**, and class practice, and class politics, in the era of the Fordisms.
This includes the facilitative design of practices of learning, self-organising, capability-building, researching and communicating. It stands in opposition to hierarchical divisions of labour and 'the right to manage', the private ownership of means of production (especially, tool-infrastructures) and the post-Fordist preconceptualising of work- and life-practice.
>Post-Fordist tropes in DaO.
- **What's new in the new social economy?**
>Commons of land and material subsistence - a passing note on this later. Robin's environmental commitment calls for a more thoroughgoing **materialist ontology** of material means of subsistence and wellbeing
Robin added a fifth blob to his map - 'the new social economy'. This section argues that the core should be seen as constituted by activist practices of **commoning**, grounded in the mutual sector. It argues also, for an analytical approach through new relations and forces of production, as distinct from (in partnership with) an approach through 'solidarity stories', pitched in terms of 'values'.
This final section deploys the revised map of four 'grand sectors' that is developed in this chapter, as the basis of three proposals for 'newness' in the new social economy, . Primarily it argus for a move **from economics to organising** in the theorising and practice of making the living economy.
A trailer for a further necessary chapter.