Here we are concerned with radical activist *formacion*, and a generative **dance of knowing** in the working and living settings of ordinary working people: everyday tools for conviviality.
This is a branch from Living economy.
A key word of Robin’s referred to this:*formacion*. Formacion implies the cultivating of capability - or as we also call it here, **labour power** - at scale, in a complex and potentially beautiful ‘dance of knowing’ whose scope embraces *skilful knowing, visioning, communicating, organising, apprehending, cultivating, assembling, making and remaking*.
The unfamiliar term *formacion* points to an underdeveloped but pivotal practice of the **forming of formations** - skilfully producing and orchestrating well-understood, well-founded, well-organised, well-oriented formations of activist practice, at scale, with scope, in the course of the everyday living and working of ‘ordinary working people’.
This is a hugely democratic *cultural* project, which inherits the intent of ‘long revolution’ that was pitched by Raymond Williams as the project - still ongoing, urgently called for - of Robin’s *May Day Manifesto* generation, at the time when New Left sensibility was tuning to the shift of gear between Fordist capitalism and post-Fordist.
Activist formations, and the formation (*formacion*) of formations, typically seem unworthy of consideration by economists and often secondary for activists who pursue 'a correct analysis', but are **primary** in making a living economy.
Making a living economy must be done in the face of a dominant, extractive, life-threatening, punitive, disempowering order of economic practice, whose very scale, forcefulness and dominance calls for . . grounded disciplined research, theory-of-practice, practice-and-theory (in that order) and research and - crucially -*development*.
**Labour power** - the skilful, aware, confident and well-focused cultivating of labour power in the individual and in the collective and in the making of each by the other - is the core focus of the formacion project: a radically altered frame of **relations of production of labour power**. Wherever 'culture' appears in these pages, consider it to mean 'the field of mundane practice of producing and mobilising labour powers'.