Over the past two years I’ve given attention, more than anything else, to the work and vision of Robin Murray *(add a note xxx)*. I’ve co-convened a loose confederation of friends and associates, and have learned to think of the central focus that we share as **the living economy**: or rather, *making* the living economy.
Living economy is a formulation Robin used in one of his last public talks *(2016 add a note xxx*). Earlier *(add a note xxxx*) he had addressed *civil economy* (in *The global civil society yearbook* xxx), and before that *social economy* *(add a note xxxx*), at a time when many attempts were made xxx to conceptualise relationships between this arguably emergent and pivotal system, and the dominant systems of market and state.
Long before that *(add note xxxx)*, he addressed the relationship - the conceptual and the practical, historical relationship - between the dominant economy (at that time seen as the economy of uneven global development and transnational corporations in monopoly capitalism - sometimes wishfully called ‘late capitalism’) and the use-value economy which might be released if the real and formal subordination of labour under capital were achieved.
He and I have been paralleling on these things for a long time, although in different spheres. From these various formulations I chose ‘living economy’, partly because it flags up, better than the others - *the living of an activist life* - an ethos or aesthetic of *aliveness* and responding to the actual aliveness of the world, and - a readiness to relate to *lives as they in fact are lived* in plural ways in plural locations; thence, a central requirement, to actively develop capabilities in this.
This puts the performing and mobilising of *life* at the centre of making the economy. This puts us well outside the norms of either ‘economics’ or many activist traditions including ‘socialism’.
At this point I see three core, historic projects in all this, which Robin and I and an entire cohort of our generation, have been engaged upon. These involve engagement in, and transforming of: - The real economy - The entire capability of making and organising, of ‘ordinary working people’, and - the capacity for Being alive to matters of the heart - forces, means and consequences in ‘the long now’, in everyday working and living.
In combination, each with its distinct orientation, these projects give a very particular character to ‘making the living economy’ and the work of formacion. More on each of these follows.
What they all have in common is the work of infrastructuring. This is outlined here: Infrastructuring.