The core intention of the Faculty of subsistence work is producing altered relations of provisioning and access, for material means of subsistence and wellbeing. Aka making the living economy.
The home pattern of the Faculty is ¿200 Making the living economy.
The foprop frame on making a living economy is a thoroughgoing materialist frame, at the heart of which is the landscape of material means of subsistence and wellbeing - ‘the real economy’ - and the practices that continuously produce and maintain this landscape, and access within this landscape. However . .
Until recent decades, a progressive, materialist frame on the real economy - the historically ‘domesticated’ landscape of material provision for subsistence - would have engaged it as being constituted by **labour processes** (under capitalism, wage-labour processes). That is, as practices of . . - materially transforming, transporting and mobilising material means - including the in-the-body capabilities and properties of human and non-human animals, plants and materials - on an increasingly wide and elaborated scale - through human labour and skill, and - the mobilising of tools and machines - as ‘use values’ that meet needs of actual communities and individuals. However, for present and future generations, two radically challenging extensions of this scope must also now be engaged.
**Wild nature** On one hand is ‘wild’, ecosystemic nature itself, on a planetary scale. Within the space of a couple of generations this has become manifestly part of the field of what is materially and significantly transformed by humans’ practices . . without intention and without simple means of control or correction: > Oceans, atmosphere, soil, icecaps, planetary energy balance, the inventory of species from large mammals to insects, plankton, plants and viruses.
Thus, in addition to ‘labour process’ in its familiar and profoundly compromised historical form, as *capitalist-colonial* accumulation, enclosure and exploitation, real economy - and future Living economy - now must include all that is highlighted by the tag of **‘the anthropocene’**.
**‘The Golemic’** On the other hand, **digital material**, and machines for handling digital material, have emerged only recently - in the lifetime of baby-boomers - but already constitute a material domain that is radically different in its capacities from the ‘natural’ or ‘domesticated’ materials alongside which the human species has evolved its capacities.
Since it *is* material, however, this domain does articulate with these other more familiar ones, constituting hybrid machines of enormous scale and material force.
At the same time, because it is ecosystemic and, over large spans, self-acting, the digital has the capacity to ‘go feral’ in every bit as significant a way as do wild nature and domesticated materials and processes. *‘The golemic’* now sits alongside wild nature and domesticated means, as an inescapably forceful extent of real economy.
> Golem: A mythical being made from clay, animated by placing a scroll of mystical texts into its mouth (for example, the Torah). Golems obey orders but are not inspiring in their judgement: they are muscle-heads.
The real economy thus must now be engaged as three intimately interwoven, ecosystemic realms: of Wild nature, Domesticated means and Digital means. Together these constitute challenges of complexity, scale and tendency previously unmet in any society. These are at the heart of the **§1 Material landscape** of the foprop frame, and this in turn is at the heart of the **¿2 Here** zone of reach in the foprop frame.
See also . .
Here we outline a basic threefold division of attention in making a living economy, which maps an extended ontology of what is ‘material’, and what our relationships with the material are. The basic division is: wild nature, domestic economy and digital means. These are presented as responses to the Anthropocene, colonialism-capitalism, and 'The Golemic'.
Here we outline families of patterns (schools) in the 'machineries' that intermediate provision in the real economy.
Here we sketch three boundary-crossing fields of practice with relationships that are problematic enough - pathological - to warrant particular attention in the making living economy. Each of them has a family of patterns, a school.
**Stewarding and mobilising the material landscape** The patterns of the ¿2 Here zone in the foprop frame are stewarded and mobilised in the ¿2 Faculty of subsistence work in the College of conviviality. The scope of this zone of reach is . . > Mobilising human and non-human beings and stuff *out-there*, in skilfully meeting material needs of human persons, for wellbeing and subsistence *in-here*.
These matters come home to roost ‘here’ . . > in the place where persons mundanely live, eat, sleep, work, make and cultivate and nurture, have children, care for dependents, share space, assemble and mobilise means . . > . . the city and neighbourhood, the home, the workplace and market place, the urban-and-rural region.
Such locations furnish for them resources on which they habitually depend or which they mundanely and habitually deploy in everyday life and work. They also are accessible (at least in principle) to direct hands-on engagement through everyday living and working. Much activism is necessarily ‘place’ based in this sense.
Zone ¿2 **Here** consists of seemingly stable settings - at least, day to day, and to a lesser extent, year-to-year; far less labile than the Aesthetic landscape of zone ¿1 In-here, which shifts second-to-second. The elements of this material landscape of real economy also manifestly constitute an everyday shared environment, a field of tacit or explicit mutuality. Both of these features make ‘Here’ and place-based organising a prime site of activism.
‘Here’ is where a person is born, acts and dies, and either has access to necessary means of subsistence and wellbeing - or doesn’t. Of course, ‘Here’ is a also place in the heart, and in culture; and consequently is both more invisible and less tractable than it might seem to be on the surface.
The livelihoods and wellbeing of our grandchildren's grandchildren hinge on what activists do 'Here'.
--- The home pattern of the Faculty is - `¿200 Making the living economy` and the home patterns of the schools in the faculty are
**Material core**: - `¿201 Commoning wild nature` - `¿202 Provisioning through domestic commons` - `¿203 Affording digital means`
**Cultural core** aka machineries of intermediation - `¿204 Machinery of provisioning` - `¿205 Machinery of exchange & contribution` - `¿206 Machinery of fairtrade` - `¿207 Machinery of rescue` - `¿208 Machinery of access - aka law`
Schhols in the Faculty of subsistence work
**Aesthetic core** aka Transgressive & cyborg means - `¿209 Waste` - `¿20A Nano` - `¿20B Prosthesis & symbiosis`
