Making a living economy, language(ing) of struggle, writing personally

Halifax: This is where I was brought up. But I didn’t know it in these ways above – C19 hub of Chartism and associationist socialism – until I read a book: EPThompson’s The making of the English working class. He was writing in the bottom right-hand corner of the town, at the same time as I was being inducted as a cadet member of the professional-managerial class, at Halifax Technical High School, in the top-left corner. Writing can matter!

In an earlier paper Goodbye universe I wrote about activist legacy and plurality, and offered a summary of the intentions of the Methuselah narratives. I also asked: what does it mean for an activist to ‘write personally’ as an alternative to organising collectives and directly mobilising cultural, economic and aesthetic formations? So, in this paper I'll briefly gloss each of the elements within this summary of intentions:

• To offer beginnings and framings of
• parallel articulations of threads in
• a weave of explicit understanding, of
• how we activists might, beyond fragments, continue to
• cultivate the collective, mutualised capability to make
• a living economy
• in the commons.