Not Not but Not yet: Present and Future in Prefigurative Politics
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | Dan Swain |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717741233 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717741233
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(1) 47 –62
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717741233
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Not Not but Not yet: Present
and Future in Prefigurative
Politics
Dan Swain
Abstract
Prefigurative politics, the idea of ‘building the new world in the shell of the old’, increasingly
forms part of the common sense of radical social and political movements but deserves more
careful conceptual analysis. Traditionally, such ideas have been discussed in contrast to ‘strategic’
politics, but this has been challenged by recent scholarship, which has stressed that they can and
should be seen as strategic. This article agrees but points to a more fundamental tension rooted
in attempting to enact the future in the present. This is discussed through two broad approaches
to prefiguration: ends-guided and ends-effacing. The former leads to a practical dilemma between
acting to bring about the future and acting as if it has already been achieved. The latter addresses
this, but nonetheless requires further articulation of the relationship between present and future
action, which the article argues can be achieved by drawing on ideas from critical pedagogy.
Keywords
prefigurative politics, social movements, means and ends, direct action, pedagogy
Accepted: 16 October 2017
Introduction
Prefigurative politics describes a notion at once radical and ubiquitous. It has formed the
grounds for practical debate in the Occupy and alter-globalisation movements (Teivanen,
2016), been used to analyse political practices ranging from the Arab Spring (Van de
Sande, 2013) to changing Britain’s National Health Service (Moskovitz and Garcia-
Lorenzo, 2016) and been defended as an important element in understanding the psychol-
ogy of social movements (Trott, 2016), while, on the other hand, identified as part of a
problematic ‘folk politics’ that forms a potential barrier to serious political engagement
(Srnicek and Williams, 2015). At least some of its formulations have seeped into popular
culture, most obviously Gandhi’s injunction to be the change you want to see. At the core
of the concept is a way of thinking about the relationship between political action in the
Department of Humanities, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
Corresponding author:
Dan Swain, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Economics and Management, Czech University of Life
Sciences Prague, Kamýcká 129, Prague 16521, Czech Republic.
Email: swaind@pef.czu.cz
741233PSX0010.1177/0032321717741233Political StudiesSwain
research-article2017
Article
48 Political Studies 67(1)
present and the future goal of an alternative world or society. Proponents will often invoke
the slogan of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, that ‘we build the new soci-
ety in the shell of the old’. Thus, John Holloway (2010: 45) describes prefigurative poli-
tics as ‘the idea that the struggle for a different society must create that society through its
forms of struggle’, while Mathijs Van de Sande (2013: 231) speaks of ‘an integration of
the “future ends” of a struggle with this very struggle itself’.
Much contemporary literature on prefigurative politics emerges from practical studies
of movements that engage in, and to some degree consciously identify with, prefigurative
practices.1 The term, at least when applied explicitly to political movements, appears to
originate in a 1977 article by Carl Boggs (1977), who uses the term to refer to ‘the embod-
iment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social rela-
tions, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’. He
identifies it as a trend within council communist, syndicalist and anarchist movements
and as a necessary corrective to an approach to politics focused solely on the seizure of
power. The term acquired greater prominence through Winifred Breines’ (1982) study of
the New Left in the 1960s, in which she associates prefigurative politics with the struggle
to build ‘community’ within social movements and identifies a sharp tension between it
and the essentially power-directed and instrumental forms of organising associated with
older organisations (see also Epstein, 1991). Breines sees this tension as playing out
sharply both within and between the various groups of the New Left. Most recently, pre-
figurative politics has emerged as a clear self-description among people engaged in the
alter-globalisation and Occupy movements (Gordon, 2008: 34–40), as well as endorsed
by influential theorists within that movement, like David Graeber (2009) and Holloway
(2010). It has taken on a particular significance in the context of the various occupations
of public space in 2011 and since, which have often been seen as themselves prefigurative
projects (Van de Sande, 2013).
While such empirical studies reveal a great deal about the practical dilemmas and
questions involved in such movements, less attention has been paid to critical analysis of
the concept itself. A great deal of discussion has been structured by a classical opposition
between prefigurative politics and strategic politics. This opposition is pithily summa-
rised (and classically oversimplified) by the title of an article in the New Internationalist
published in the aftermath of the Occupy movement, Should we fight the power or be the
change? (Engler and Engler, 2014). Drawing on both Boggs and Breines, this essentially
represents the division as a fundamental tension which all such projects have to navigate.
However, much recent scholarship has challenged this assumption, emphasising how
those involved in prefigurative movements have little problem dealing with strategic
questions in practice. In part, this is because of a deep belief that prefiguration is the best
strategy, something backed up, in their opinion, by results.
This article agrees with those who have stressed that the contrast to strategy is one-
sided and fails to capture what is distinctive about prefigurative politics. As argued further
in the following section, those involved in prefigurative projects recognise themselves as
engaged in strategic projects, and can (and do) offer strategic justifications for what they
do. However, the article aims to identify a more significant tension, based not on an eva-
sion of strategy, but on acting in order to bring about the future and acting as if it has
already been achieved. This tension is fundamental to prefigurative politics to the extent
that it remains, in the main, a radical project of social transformation, about identifying and
building, as Marianne Maeckelbergh (2011: 3) puts it, ‘(an)other world(s)’ which are dis-
tant and remote from our own. This tension is discussed in relation to two broad approaches
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