This is where I develop work in progress towards a cluster of formacion coops - a venture following the vision of Robin Murray in **making the living economy**. It exploits the new thinking of the **DisCO governance model** for distributed, commons-oriented coops and aims for a radical co-produced infrastructuring of **tools for conviviality** in activist practice.
This is work in progress which - especially in some areas - will only be made sufficiently concrete and actionable through collaboration between numerous specialised capabilities. Contact the writer as noted on the Welcome Visitors page.
> NOTE Feb 2020 - In the form it's taking at present this whole thing is way too wordy to be a proposal. But I'm going with it, since that seems to be what it takes to get the shape, texture and aesthetic fully developed. Later we can slim it out.
# Making the Living Economy - A cooperative college of conviviality This is a draft prospectus. It emerges from a couple of directions. Most directly, at arises in response to the vision and practice of Robin Murray, with the intention of carrying this forward.
It also carries an intention of bringing the vision of a generation of libertarian socialist activists into an engagement with profoundly changing and challenging times, and the forms of movements, expectations and means that are possible and necessary in these times.
It proposes a cluster of federated coops whose work is **formacion**: coproducing capability in making the living economy, through the making and mobilising of ‘tools for conviviality’ which facilitate *the formacion of activist formations*.
This document runs as follows . .
1 Frame - Here we outline three broad projects that are implicit in Making the Living Economy. These furnish the rationale for a venture of formacion.
2 Intention - Here we outline the intention of the cluster, as one of **infrastructuring** radical practice with tools for conviviality (Ivan Illich’s notion), and in this way constituting radical vernacular capability in **knowing, communicating and organising** in mundane settings of work and life, for the common weal. We also describe the relationship of this venture with Robin’s work and vision.
3 Aesthetic - Here we characterise the **structure of feeling** that informs this venture of formacion. We do this in terms of the altered **relations of production** embodied in the practice of the federated coops, weaving and infrastructuring radical formations and ventures, making the living economy. And we identify their ‘Robinish’ nature.
4 Structure - Here we characterise this cluster as **a system of ventures**. We use a standard kind of systems map to specify the institutional structure and working relationships between core actors, the dynamics and processes of formacion, and the core enacted operational principles (the aesthetic) of the cluster.
5 Commoning in three landscapes - Here we describe the ‘cells’ that are being created in this venture: living cells of formacion in making the living economy. We describe the operational domains of each of the cell-coops. The coops are intended to have differing, complementary, interacting scopes: they are an ecosystem.
6 Operations - Here we describe the ethos of a family of distributed cooperative organisations (DisCOs), including care work, contribution of different kinds, commoning, and mechanics and principles of credit.
7 Livelihood, funding and contribution - Here we examine issues of livelihood and contribution for workers in the conviv coops, in the context of wage-labour, grant funding and accumulation in the commons.
8 Commons economics - Here we engage the pivotal differences between production (and infrastructures of tools) in commoning and in extractive commodity production and exchange. We consider the production of the economics of a commoned society, and characterise it as a moral economy of living, associated, mutualising society.
9 The labour process of formacion - Here we describe the kind of work that the coops do with their partner ventures, including pattern languaging, wiki pods, facilitation and action learning sets and literacy in 'the dance of knowing'.