This project aims to evolve a pattern language for activist living-and-working in the making of a Living economy. See [Pattern language(ing)](https://foprop.org/doc/pattern-languageing-uaMLOW6W08). The basis of the pattern language is attention to forces of production (fop) and (radically altered) relations of production (rop), and this generates the name of the project: foprop.
In order for patterns to be patterns of radical practice, each needs to have, at its core, some altered relations of production. That is, a practice that instatiates such patterns will *de facto* be prefigurative: an element of the hands-on, in-practice making of a Living economy.
**‘Relations of production’** is a term from historical (and ‘cultural’) materialism. Societies move historically from one mode of production to another - for example (in ‘advanced’ countries of the West) from feudalism to capitalism beginning decisively in the eighteenth century, or from Fordist capitalism to post-Fordist capitalism in the 1960s. Such epochs can be distinguished by differing, successive frameworks of relations of production, which give particular material articulation to the practices that constitute the forces of production in that society.
Capitalism is distinguished for example by the prevalence of the social relations that constitute *capital* as a principle of society and economy: - *wage labour* (replacing feudal relations of aristocracy and peasantry) - *commodity production*, consumption and exchange (the rule of *exchange value* and the market, with marginalisation of subsistence production in the household) - *private ownership* (including corporate ownership) and disposition of the means of production (as distinct from hereditary, aristocratic ownership and disposition), and - the systematic *extraction of surplus value* by capitalists (as distinct from the pursuit of use-value per se, as a rationale for work).
In post-Fordist capitalist production, further relations of production (in addition to those of classic capitalism) also become hegemonic, including *pre-conceptualisation*: the systematic designing, researching and enforcing of specific forms of forces of production (in all spheres of life and work) by specialised cohorts of professional-managerial workers, rather than under any traditional or ‘craft’ regime of knowledge.
This present project adopts a wide perspective on **forces of production**, seeing them - and their necessary intentional transformation in activist practice - not only in *economic life* and fields of work (the production of goods and services, the utilisation of material means for subsistence), but also in *cultural production* (the production and reproduction of knowledges, collective capabilities and forms of organisation) and in *aesthetic production* (the production and reproduction of affiliations, valuations, identities and commitments). See: [Landscapes of (and in) practice](https://foprop.org/doc/landscapes-of-and-in-practice-vRhYe54bou). Thus a pattern language is based on descriptions of altered relations of production in landscapes of practice.
This basic orientation to forces of production (fop) and (radically altered) relations of production (rop) generates the name of the project: **foprop**.
foprop is a [Politics of production](https://foprop.org/doc/politics-of-production-gkshqOFezu) in a fundamental sense, understanding all human perception and action to be ‘produced’, and altered perceptions and actions to be differently produced. foprop is about that altered production: it is a practice of producing the capacity for altered production, of the Living Economy - a practice of formación.