# Living economy Mike Hales >Here we outline the origins of the term 'living economy'. It is not a bid for yet another kind of movement. Rather, it's part of a move to federate and align across fragments and movement silos, around core practices that can be deployed by all in locally meanngful ways, in creating commons of resources and of contributions. Over the past two years (@ 2020) I’ve given attention, more than anything else, to the work and vision of [Robin Murray](http://mhresources.federated.wiki/robin-murray.html). 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). Earlier (2012) he had addressed **civil economy** (in The global civil society yearbook), and before that **social economy** (2009), at a time when many attempts were being made to conceptualise relationships between this arguably emergent and pivotal system, and the dominant systems of market and state. - Robin Murray (2009), *Danger and opportunity - Crisis and the new social economy*, NESTA/Young Foundation. [pdf](https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Danger-and-Opportunity-September-2009.pdf) - Robin Murray (2012), Global civil society and the rise of the civil economy, *openDemocracy*, 03may2012. [website](https://www.opendemocracy.net/robin-murray/global-civil-society-and-rise-of-civil-economy) - Robin Murray (2016), *Late Environmental Economist Robin Murray's Views on Creating a New Economy*, Upstream podcasts [podcast](https://www.shareable.net/blog/podcast-late-environmental-economist-robin-murrays-views-on-creating-a-new-economy) [pdf](https://cloud.owncube.com/s/BTAC6rZArpX8xZA) Long before that, from the 70s, 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 choose ‘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 of activist movements, 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 these many lives, in many places. This intention, to put the active performing and mobilising of life - and opposition to deathly forces - at the centre of making the economy, 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 for 50 years. These involve engagement in, and transforming of: - the real economy of provision of means of subsistence and wellbing - the entire capability of making and organising, of ‘ordinary working people’, and - the capacity for being alive to forces, means and consequences in ‘the long now’ and on planetary scales, in everyday working and living. In combination, each with its distinct orientation, these projects give a very particular character to ‘making the living economy’. >Draft: To be published at http://1-economy.federated.wiki/living-economy.html