Prefigurative Politics. Paul Raekstad

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ violent British colonial occupation by promoting prefigurative independence projects. The Swaraj (‘self-rule’) movement led by Mahatma Gandhi is most famous for this. Gandhi’s alleged quote ‘Be the change that you wish to see in the world’ (which was most likely not uttered by Gandhi at all, see John 2011) has become something of a slogan of prefigurativism today. While Gandhi is not a good example of prefigurativism for several reasons,² many other Indian liberation activists have supported the creation of egalitarian schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods in resistance to colonial white supremacy and dispossession of indigenous Indians (Ramnath 2011: 177–87). For instance, Rabindranath Tagore was an independence activist who resisted the colonialism, racism and discrimination of the British Imperial education system in India by founding a college in Santiniketan in West Bengal. The college admitted indigenous Bengalis, taught them in their native language, offered generalist rather than specialist education, and involved students in some of its decision-making – none of which were done in British colonial colleges. Tagore also founded a nearby agricultural school (Sriniketan), which later grew into a whole village that provided both jobs and education for people who had otherwise been excluded from the British education system (Bhattacharya 2014: 5).

      From the 1960s onwards, US- and Europe-based liberation movements were often influenced by these practices. The Black Panther Party is one oft-mentioned example, and rightly so. They ran a series of Community Programmes in the 1960s and ’70s, the most famous being the large and successful breakfast programme, which at its high point provided free cooked breakfasts for 10,000 children every morning before school across several cities (Bloom and Martin 2013: ch. 7). While the kids ate their breakfasts cooked by volunteers using ingredients that local supermarkets had been persuaded to donate, the Panthers gave Black History lessons and read out Party messages. These breakfasts were a preview of the kind of society the Panthers were fighting for: a communist society where nobody went hungry, where Black people’s history was not forgotten or marginalised, and where neighbours came together to help each other and socialise, for free. Other Community Programmes included free health clinics, free food and clothing programmes, and a sickle cell anaemia research project. These implemented parts of the vision set out in the Panthers’ ten-point programme: ‘We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society … We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace’ (Black Panther Party 1966).

There were many sides to the Panthers’ strategy, not all of them prefigurative – from patrolling the streets in resistance to police brutality, to educational projects, protests and running for office in local elections. While their Community Programmes are often cited as a quintessential example of prefigurative activism, the Panthers were also an explicitly vanguardist organisation – a term drawn from Marxist-Leninism that often implies a more capable elite leading the movement from above (Clemons and Jones 2001: 29). We should also point out that Huey Newton and other Party leaders were heavily influenced by Maoism, which differs on a number of points from the strands of socialism that are more commonly associated with prefigurative politics (Newton 1974), notably on questions of taking existing state power and the value of vanguard parties. This combination of approaches is a theme that will recur in this book, reflecting the fact that prefigurative politics need not exclude a range of other, non-prefigurative, tactics.

      Feminist movements in the 1960s also played a pivotal role in the development of prefigurative politics, as currently understood. The famous slogan ‘the personal is political’ emerged in this era and, as we will see in Chapters 2 and 5, became an important part of prefigurative critiques of certain hierarchically organised social movements fixated on seizing control of the state.³ Feminists highlighted hierarchies, inequalities, and exploitation that go beyond the reach of formal rules and laws. We will look more closely at the theory behind this in later chapters, but when it came to practical action, the personal being political meant that our personal lives and daily behaviours are and should be recognised as an important site of political struggle. This is why, for example, feminists started disobeying repressive gender norms in their daily lives, running skill-shares to teach each other important life skills such as house maintenance and car mechanics, and leaving a fair share of household and care work duties to men, among many other things. Large parts of the contemporary queer movement can be understood as a continuation of this. Many queer activists call for the abolition of patriarchal gender roles and other forms of patriarchal governance, while implementing queerness in their own lives and in their collective organising (for example by refusing to act, look, or identify as the gender they were assigned at birth, or any gender at all). On this radical conception of queerness, being queer is not (only) a personal choice but a commitment to collective resistance to patriarchy, expressed through the prefiguring of non-patriarchal relations, ways of organising, and ways of behaving in the here-and-now (see e.g. Gleeson 2017).

This brief and incomplete retrospective⁴ shows that prefigurative politics is not merely an invention of white European scholars in Western academia, but has been part of social movements in different places and settings for a long time.

(b) The Term and the Idea

      The term ‘prefigurative politics’ in its current sense, however, did emerge in Western academia in the late 1970s, when Carl Boggs (1977a, 1977b), and later Wini Breines (1980) and others, applied it to their discussions of New Left movements of the 1960s and ’70s.⁵ The New Left saw a widening of socialist concerns and strategies, increasingly turning to questions of civil rights, feminism, gay rights, and other so-called ‘cultural’ issues. Boggs especially was interested in how these New Left movements related to different strands of anarchism, syndicalism, and Marxism. As we will see in Chapter 2, Boggs was right to trace the origins of that concept of prefigurative politics to these strands of socialism, so we will briefly define them here to explain what they are (although we also argue in later chapters that Boggs and other authors have underestimated the importance of feminist, and especially Black feminist, theory and practice to prefigurative politics). To start with anarchism, there’s no generally agreed-upon definition of the term, but the historical anarchist movement that Boggs and Breines refer to generally shares a commitment to the following:

      Fiercely opposed to all forms of social and economic inequality and oppression, anarchism rejected capitalism, the state and hierarchy in general. A revolutionary and libertarian doctrine, anarchism sought the establishment of individual freedom through the creation of a cooperative, democratic, egalitarian and stateless socialist order. This would be established through the direct action of the working class and peasantry, waging an international and internationalist social revolution against capitalism, landlordism and the state. (van der Walt and Hirsch 2010: xxxvi–xxxvii)

Syndicalism is a form of revolutionary trade unionism (Darlington 2013: 5), that seeks to use revolutionary union activities to replace capitalism with a society based (either partly or wholly) on union structures. Anarcho-syndicalism is a variety of syndicalism that explicitly aims for an anarchist society by employing anarchist means. They both focus on the union as an essential instrument of struggle because as an organisation it can implement key aspects of the desired future society in the here-and-now. Marxism, meanwhile, is a hugely diverse tradition – one that’s simply too varied and heterogeneous to be defined adequately here. Different strands of Marxism tend to share a commitment to universal human emancipation through working-class self-emancipation, guided by the ideas of Karl Marx – though what this amounts to in practice varies tremendously. Carl Boggs looked at different kinds of relationship between various forms of anarchist and Marxist thought on the one hand, and the New Left’s commitment to prefigurative politics on the other.

      Boggs published two articles in 1977 that, in a way, introduced the term prefigurative politics in its current sense. We say ‘in a way’ because the term ‘prefigurative’ had existed previously and been used in political contexts before, which we’ll explain in СКАЧАТЬ