Here we develop **forces of production** and the accompanying construct, relations of production, as labour-process terms that help make sense of how practices are organised in society and in history, what they contribute and how they may be changed in activist practice.
Forces of production (**FoP**) refers here to the totality of historical practices in some particular practical sphere: a community, an economy, a region, etc. A constellaion of forces of production is a piece of the **mundane fabric** of practices woven together in **everyday living and working**. We are concerned to rigorously and practically understand how FoPs are organised and cultivated, woven and transformed. We are engaged here in **theory of practice**, although we are necessarily engaged - first, last and always - in practice. Rigour(s), plural
**FoP** and relations of production - **RoP** - are constructs adopted from traditions of historical materialism/Marxism. In that setting they apply to the commonplace domain of (liberal-individualist, capitalist) economics - the **‘dead’ landscapes** of money, abstract markets, abstract value, commodity exchange, financial calculus, buildings and machinery, materials of production, etc. In the context of the **living economy**, however, they are taken much further, into rich *cultural materialist* territory (the cultural landscape). And beyond, into the regions of the heart-mind (the aesthetic landscape). §2 Cultural landscape §3 Aesthetic landscape
Expoanded in this way, they are notions that engage not with abstract **forms** (the material organisation of stuff and of exchange), but with **formations** of activist practice - self-conscious practices of transforming society and achieving liberation - and with the skills that activists need to cultivate and mobilise in establishing and mobilising those practices. Rather than 'economics', this expanded frame is the frame of **making the living economy**; and of **living the making**, in an actual activist life.
As a thoroughgoing materialist frame on practices of living and working, foprop engages **three landscapes of practice** which stand in an intimate, inseparable relationship with one another, as represented in the foprop weave.
DOT FROM preview-next-diagram STATIC strict digraph { rankdir=LR node [style=filled fillcolor=lightyellow] "foprop - Making the living economy" node [style=filled fillcolor=lightblue] node [style=filled fillcolor=white] "foprop - Making the living economy" -> "Forces of production" "foprop - Making the living economy" -> "Relations of production" "foprop - Making the living economy" -> "The foprop weave" "foprop - Making the living economy" -> "Weft - Three landscapes of material existence" "foprop - Making the living economy" -> "Warp - Four zones of proximity and reach"}