Prefigurative Politics. Paul Raekstad

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СКАЧАТЬ However, in those earlier uses it had not had the same meaning and connotations. Boggs set out his argument as a critique of Marxism-Leninism, which according to him holds that elite-led political parties can carry out the transition from capitalism to a free, equal, and democratic socialist society. Marxist-Leninists therefore advocate centralised social movements that focus on seizing control of the existing state and using it to nationalise the economy, abolish private property,⁶ and transition to socialism. In time, this is supposed to lead to a free and stateless society traditionally called communism.

The Bolsheviks who led the Russian Revolution in 1917 did little to theorise how a better society might be built once the state had been seized (Boggs 1977a). Cultural and informal hierarchies were expected to crumble, and the state itself was expected to eventually ‘wither away’, though it was unclear how this would happen. Attempts to address this issue by organising masses of people in workers’ and community councils independently of the state, attempting to construct free and democratic organs of worker self-management, were quashed.

      Boggs was not surprised that this approach to socialist revolution has led, not to free, equal, and democratic utopias, but to regimes that have often reproduced the very hierarchies they were intended to oppose. Boggs’ two articles touch on several key issues that we will expand on in this book: the tension between prefigurative approaches to revolution and the seizure of the state; an attention to informal as well as formal power relations; and a focus on hierarchies that stem from other relations than class relations, such as patriarchy, white supremacy, and ableism.

      The definition of prefigurative politics Boggs provided was a broad one: an organisation or movement embodying ‘those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are [its] ultimate goal’ (1977b: 100). Subsequent authors have defined prefigurative politics more narrowly; for example, some focus only on the use of horizontal organisational structures in social movement groups, and others on an apparent reluctance by social movements to organise strategically (see e.g. Breines 1980; Smucker 2017). Like Boggs, we prefer a broader definition of prefigurative politics, but we have our own exact formulation. We define prefigurative politics as the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now. We will use ‘prefigurative politics’ and ‘prefigurativism’ synonymously to refer to this idea.⁷ This definition captures a wide variety of things that get labelled prefigurative politics – from the organisational debates in the First International to the subversion of gendered norms in the contemporary feminist movement. Being committed to prefigurative politics means being committed to the idea that if we want to replace certain social structures, then we need to reflect some aspect(s) of the future structures we want in the movements and organisations we develop to fight for them. On this definition, prefigurative politics is a much more common phenomenon than is often thought. It is not an alternative to struggle against our society’s oppression, exploitation, and injustice; it’s a way of carrying that struggle out.

Defining political concepts and making sense of the politics they are part of is a tricky endeavour. Only something without a history can be rigorously defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions in a way that captures all of its usages.⁸ Whenever you define, say, a term, you end up having to do so in ways that are incompatible with the way at least some people have been, are, and/or will use that term. But definitions are often vital to knowing what we are talking about. To make sense of the large, and at times complicated and contradictory literature on prefigurative politics, we take an approach that can be described as rational reconstruction. That is, we take an ongoing body of ideas and practices as our point of departure. This will inevitably be varied, contradictory, and sometimes confused. We draw from our experiences and observations of these practices, our readings about previous movements and organisations, and the writings of those who relate to them as participants and opponents, supporters and critics. On this basis, we make the best sense we can of what prefigurative politics is and of the arguments for and against it. As such, our definition isn’t intended to capture all uses and abuses of ‘prefigurative politics’. Instead, it’s intended to clarify the core features that the practices talked about as ‘prefigurative politics’ have in common, in order to be able to make sense of and use it as a political concept. This should help to make the concept a useful tool both for understanding the world and for changing it.

(c) About This Book

      This is the first dedicated book on prefigurative politics as a concept and idea. Much has been written about examples of social movements that practise prefigurative politics, but usually without a rigorous investigation of the theory and assumptions that are associated with the concept.

In recent years, prefigurative politics have been much discussed in connection with a wide range of contemporary social movements. They include bottom-up movements in Latin America, like the Zapatistas in Mexico, recuperated factory and neighbourhood movements in Argentina, and a host of other non-hierarchical movements.⁹ Also often discussed is the so-called New Democracy Movement – which includes not only Occupy and the Movement of the Squares, but also 15M in Spain, Nuit Debout in France, and more¹⁰ – as has a broad swathe of North American social movements.¹¹ Other important examples include 21st Century Socialism¹² and Democratic Confederalism,¹³ which try to combine taking existing state power with certain forms of prefigurative politics. Finally, we would be remiss not to mention the resurgent syndicalist movements worldwide (Ness 2014).

      On a theoretical level, different kinds of prefigurative politics are also being fiercely debated among thinkers drawing on classical anarchist¹⁴ and Marxist ideas.¹⁵ Most thinkers discuss only one or two kinds of prefiguration, limited themselves to only one or two cases, or they talk about prefiguration as part of, or in relation to, a whole host of other things. They do not provide an overview of the different major strands of prefigurative politics today and the different arguments for and against them. That’s what this book sets out to do, offering a way into thinking about the theory and practices of prefigurative politics, with a particular focus on those parts of it that are important and contested today. Our book does not, however, try to be completely comprehensive or to provide a complete guide to everything that has been and might be labelled ‘prefigurative politics’. To take just one example, we do not write very much about cooperatives, in part because there’s not that much disagreement about their role in the transition to a better society.

      One of the biggest challenges in writing about prefigurative politics is that you can’t simply be told what it is. You can’t properly understand it by simply reading or hearing about what it’s like. You have to experience if for yourself. In fact, as we will see, one of the most prominent arguments for prefigurative politics is precisely that it can show you something that can’t be properly explained through words alone: what free, equal, and democratic forms of social organisation might really be like.

We, the two authors, first met back in the early 2010s in the London chapter of the International Organisation for a Participatory Society, an organisation that centred on analysing, promoting and educating on a particular vision of a future society. We have both worked and lived in prefigurative organisations in the UK and the Nordic countries, including radical non-profit and cooperative cafes, student organisations, an anarcho-syndicalist organisation, a platformist organisation, parts of the Occupy movement, social centres, communal living spaces, and art collectives. For the past fifteen years we’ve been active in queer-feminist, environmental, antiracist, and anti-capitalist activist organisations in Western Europe. As professional (or in Saio’s case, semi-professional) academics we have also dedicated part of our recent research to prefigurative politics. This book is therefore the result of our personal experiences as much as our academic research.

      However, this also highlights one of the limitations of the book. Our views and arguments are significantly shaped by the strengths and weaknesses that our social and historical position brings with it. We are two white people with PhDs who work in Western European universities. Both of us grew СКАЧАТЬ