deep freedom 339scribing something that we have learned how to repeat. As such, it is
the opposite of the imagination. Our liberation from machine- like jobs
depends on the massive economic and cultural changes that would al-
low us to create non- formulaic jobs in large number. Th ese changes are
unlikely in turn to advance far until wage labor begins to give way to
some combination of self- employment and cooperation as the predom-
inant form of free labor. Th e broad mass of ordinary men and women
can then become masters of themselves, opposing the interests of those
who, in the name of either private property or the state, would control
them.
Th ese goals, making explicit what it would mean to reshape a coop-
erative regime in the semblance of the imagination, are so remote from
our present or our powers of proximate implementation that they can
easily be dismissed as a utopian dream. Th eir role, however, is to signal
a direction, made all the clearer by the intransigence of its intentions.
To mark a direction is the fi rst attribute of a programmatic argument,
informed by an understanding of transformative opportunity. Th e sec-
ond attribute is to identify, in a par tic u lar circumstance, initial steps by
which to begin moving in that direction.
In the spirit of envisaging such steps, consider the affi nity between
our cooperative practices and our imaginative life from the vantage of
momentous changes already taking place in the or ga ni za tion of work
and production. A new way of cooperating begins to emerge through-
out much of the world. Although it has been studied at greatest length
as a form of industrial production, it applies as well to other sectors of
the economy and to extra economic activities, from administration to
education.
Its hallmarks are the weakening of any rigid contrast between con-
ception and execution, the permanent reinvention of specialized work
roles, the mixture of cooperation and competition in the same domains,
the ongoing revision of the way identities and interests are under-
stood, and the turning of the practical activity, whether within or
outside production, into a practice of collective learning and collective
innovation.
Will the sectors of practical activity marked by these characteristics
remain a worldwide archipelago of islands of experimentalism, from
which the vast majority of men and women remain excluded in richer