On the necessity of prefigurative politics

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the concept of prefiguration by outlining the necessity of its contribution to a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s. In the introduction, I explain how the object of critique for many social theorists has shifted over the course of the last decade from neoliberal globalization to capitalism understood as an encompassing form of life. In light of this, I enumerate the features that should define a progressive public philosophy: radical, emancipatory, and decolonized. The introduction is followed by an overview of the academic debates emerging after the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007–8. Among these, accelerationism fundamentally rejects the incorporation of prefigurative politics in any emancipatory political agenda. To better understand this position, I examine the origin and meaning of prefiguration and prefigurative practices in more detail in Section III. In it, I argue that prefigurative politics entails a holistic approach to social change that digs its roots in feminist and ecological thought and focuses on social reproduction and the preservation of life rather than solely economic production. Subsequently, I deploy the case of Occupy Wall Street to show that a growing number of contemporary social movements are implementing a dualistic strategy that simultaneously combines repertoires of action typical of protest movements with prefigurative practices focused on the embodiment of alternatives. This dualism, along with the limited success of Occupy Wall Street in concretizing its claims and goals, has led prefigurative politics to being labelled as incompatible with, if not even hindering, any emancipatory strategy. My argument instead is that prefigurative politics constitutes a fundamental and necessary component of any political strategy aimed at transcending contemporary capitalism since it conceives progressive social change in an ontologically and epistemologically different way with respect to political parties and protest movements. Taking this into consideration, I conclude that conventional politics and prefigurative politics can be seen as having the potential to mutually reinforce each other and that prefigurative politics should be acknowledged as a pivotal concept in establishing a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s. Only by doing so, will this philosophy be truly radical, emancipatory, and decolonial.

I Introduction

To fulfil its mission, any emancipatory social science faces three basic tasks: first, to elaborate a systematic diagnosis and critique of the world, as it exists; second, to envision viable alternatives; and third, to understand the obstacles, possibilities and dilemmas of transformation. (Wright, 2006: 94)

Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks describes a crisis as an ‘interregnum’, a moment in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci, 1971 [1951]). Indeed, in ancient Roman law this word refers to the period following the death of one emperor and the proclamation of his successor. During this time span, an ‘interrex’ – literally an ‘in between king’ – used to be temporarily in power. The historical moment which we are currently living in shares all the Gramscian ‘morbid symptoms’ of an interregnum: instability and uncertainty causing fear, apprehension and turmoil and, at the same time, anticipation, fervor and hope for what has yet to come. This is in part due to a small but growing awareness that contemporary capitalism is no longer sustainable if we are to tackle the multiple political, socio-economic, and ecological crises ongoing simultaneously. Taking this as the point of departure, the special issue that this article is a part of aims to gather a collection of proposals for a ‘progressive public philosophy for the 2020s’ (Kaspersen and Egholm, this issue). The task is, obviously, a daunting one. First and foremost because any proposal develops necessarily out of a critique, a refusal of the status quo and, given the context briefly outlined above, any critical diagnosis could potentially target a variety of different, albeit deeply intertwined, issues and develop into as many argumentative paths. Before engaging in this endeavor, it is therefore important to delimit its scope and its boundaries. In addition, the effort to come forth with a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s cannot limit itself to a critical assessment of the present. It should also seek to help new political subjects to coalesce, to persist, and to envision alternatives to the status quo. But perhaps most importantly, it must engage in a dialogical exchange with these subjects in order to be genuinely public. Political theory and philosophy, especially in the current environment of widespread anti-intellectualism, must not refrain from fellow-traveling with civil society and grassroots movements.

This preamble begs the question: alternatives to what exactly? After the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007–8 we have witnessed a shift in the public debate from a critique targeting neoliberal globalization to a critique of capitalism as the dominant socio-economic and political system. As noted by Rahel Jaeggi (2013), these critical approaches to capitalism have at times had an inflationary character, evidenced by hyperbolic newspaper articles on the forthcoming ‘end of capitalism’. ¹ Nevertheless, this has provided a clearance of sorts for a vibrant discussion to emerge around alternatives to capitalism, especially in the social sciences. Several proponents of these alternatives consider neoliberalism as a specific ‘mode’ of capitalism and, by consequence, focus their critique and analyses on capitalism rather than neoliberalism. This necessitates broadening the Marxian definition that reduces capitalism to economic production based on private property with the goal of accumulating capital and seeking profits. To achieve this, Nancy Fraser defines capitalism as an ‘institutionalized social order’ thriving along multiple boundary lines or separations: economic vs. social reproduction, supranational economy vs. national polity, and human vs. non-human nature (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 52–3). Rahel Jaeggi goes a step further by overcoming the ‘economy versus society’ dualism typical of Polanyi and arguing for a monistic social theory in which the economy is not a separate sphere from society but is instead a set of practices that constitute, together with cultural, social and personal practices, a form of life (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 51).

Accepting Fraser and Jaeggi’s invitation to ‘de-orthodoxify’ the understanding of capitalism implies recognizing in the first place that capitalism exists, and manages to reproduce itself over time so successfully, exactly because of its ‘background conditions of possibility’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 28): the undervalued economy of care and social reproduction, the accumulation of resources through the exploitation of nature, and the primacy of business over politics. Secondly, it means redefining capitalism as a form of life (Cole and Ferrarese, 2018): a set of practices that ‘are configurations of human coexistence, and thus [are] continually reproduced’ (2018: 106). It is precisely the reproduction of capitalist practices over time and the process of their sedimentation into shared habits, beliefs, organizations and institutions that ends up creating what Fraser calls an ‘institutionalized social order’. From this perspective, capitalism is an ossified configuration of human life and its existence is made possible by expropriative and exploitative mechanisms. Thus, in order to transcend capitalism, it is necessary to envision and embody alternative forms of life capable of ‘breaking with the comfort of the familiar’ (Cole and Ferrarese, 2018: 106).

In Horkheimer’s words, ‘social philosophy’ constitutes a means to examine how humans produce and reproduce their forms of life during the course of history (Horkheimer, 2018 [1931]). A progressive public philosophy for the 2020s able to foster and sustain alternatives must therefore be radical, in the literal sense, in that it should aim at a profound rearrangement of the roots – in Latin ‘radixes’ or ‘radices’ – of the existing order as described above. Such a philosophy must also be emancipatory, understood as being morally directed towards the sustainable flourishing of human and non-human life on this planet (Wright, 2006). To safeguard all of life on this planet, though, it is necessary to acknowledge the profound interdependence and interconnectedness between the so-called Global North and Global South at the economic, political, and ecological level. In this vein, feminist scholar Sara Motta has called for an ‘epistemological decolonization’ of 20th-century critique, encouraging its opening to ‘multiple knowledges, multiple subjects of knowing and multiple practices of creating knowledge’ (Motta, 2016: 44–5). This means recognizing that the vast majority of ‘knowledges’ deployed by contemporary critical thinkers are rooted in the European and North American tradition of social and political thought. This results in an almost unconscious constant focus on the knowledges, subjects and practices stemming from that part of the world. A greater awareness of this situation must lead, on one side, to the examination of different ‘knowledges’, as Motta calls them, and, on the other, to a better acknowledgement of the dynamics and asymmetries of power between the Global North and the Global South. Thus, a third feature of a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s is that it be decolonized. By ‘decolonized’ I mean not only decolonized from the supremacy of Western-centric thought, but also from the several normativities that these generate concerning the spheres of social reproduction, values, and visions of the ‘good life’. In sum, a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s should, ideally, be radical, emancipatory, and decolonized.

Clearly, outlining a ready-made intellectual program for the constitution of a new progressive public philosophy is beyond the scope of this article. My aim, nevertheless, is to address one of the most enduring and animated debates within the field of social theory and philosophy: how can we bring about progressive social change? Countless political programs, pamphlets, and manifestos have been drafted and discussed throughout the course of history in attempts to answer this question and continue to be so today. Thus, rather than trying to provide a fully-fledged answer, I instead seek to shed light on a more circumscribed and specific turn taken by the debate in recent years: the transformative potential of prefigurative politics vis-à-vis more conventional politics. My goal in this article is twofold. Firstly, I want to demonstrate that prefigurative politics and conventional politics (i.e. politics performed by political parties, political organizations, and protest movements in the realm of representative democracy) should not be conceived as mutually exclusive but rather mutually reinforcing; prefiguration, in fact, aims at transcending capitalism by tackling social reproduction, by embodying change, and by radically reshaping human needs, habits, and beliefs. This will allow me in turn to claim that prefiguration must be considered a pivotal concept for a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s because it embraces a holistic understanding of change. A change that through its radical, emancipatory, and decolonized nature is able to offset the existing configurations of human existence.

The article develops as follows. In the next section, I lay the foundation for understanding some of the contemporary debates within the left regarding strategies to transcend contemporary capitalism. In Section III, I then define prefigurative politics and explain why the concept is receiving increasing scholarly attention despite its detractors. After that, I deploy the case of Occupy Wall Street to show that several contemporary social movements are characterized by a dualistic nature that combines traditional social movement repertoires of action with prefigurative practices focused on embodying alternatives in the here and now. This then allows me to engage with strands of the debate depicting prefigurative politics as incompatible with any sort of emancipatory strategy. Finally, in Section V, I develop my argument that prefigurative politics constitutes a fundamental component of any political strategy aimed at transcending contemporary capitalism because it approaches progressive social change in a way that is ontologically and epistemologically different.

II Overcoming contemporary capitalism: Fast and slow alternatives

The real power resides in the ability of the community to transform the old social order, to create new, democratic forms of life. The production of subjectivity […] is not only merely a matter of consciousness-raising but also a kind of ontological deposit […]. This is a biopolitical transformation. (Hardt and Negri, 2017: 271)

Two women stand with their lower bodies immersed in water in the middle of a flooded Piazza San Marco (Venice), one of the most touristic places in the world. Amused and laughing, they hold their boots and two voluminous yellow Louis Vuitton shopping bags high to prevent the expensive content from getting soaked (see Figure 1). ² The photograph was taken during a 2018 flood described by meteorologists as one of the most severe in the last three decades. The scene conveys something apocalyptic and, at the same time, dystopian as if even extreme weather events are not enough to stop humanity’s insatiable hunger for conspicuous consumption. It is also a powerful metaphor for the unstoppable force of capitalism amidst the current climatic and ecological crisis. The photograph was widely circulated on social media and often published with the subtitle ‘Sometimes it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism’ by left-wing groups such as Potere al Popolo during the COP24 climate summit held in Poland.

Figure 1.

Two women crossing the flooded Piazza San Marco, Venice.

The preceding quote ³ is the opening line of Mark Fisher’s well known book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, published in 2009. In the book, the author – founder of the underground blog ‘k punk’ and prolific intellectual until his premature death in 2017 – starts by describing ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system…it is now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 2). By accompanying the reader along a journey marked by an abundance of philosophical and cultural references, the landscape portrayed by Fisher leaves no hope for alternatives whatsoever. Late capitalism ‘subsumes and consumes’ everything: history, culture, and ideology. That said, Fisher distances his position from Francis Fukuyama’s conception of the ‘end of history’ (2006 [1992]) and clarifies that his concept of ‘capitalist realism’ must not to be confused with Fredrick Jameson’s idea of postmodernism. Capitalist realism is, rather, a subsequent, terminal stage of history. A stage where neoliberal political economy has managed to spread and normalize the ‘ontology of business’ to the point of pervading every sector of life, breaking the boundaries of public and private spheres, and making ‘what was previously deemed to be impossible (i.e. the privatization of every sector of life) seem attainable’ (Fisher, 2009: 17).

Similar to many other thinkers on the radical left, Fisher does not perceive the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007–8 as the end of capitalism, rather as a moment marking the profound crisis of neoliberalism (as a ‘mode’ of capitalism) that might generate rare windows of opportunity for alternatives to emerge. Surprisingly, despite the pessimistic tone of the entire book, which convincingly depicts the seeming inevitability of capital’s hegemony, Fisher closes by pushing the ball forward and sketching his programmatic manifesto for the left:

The failure of previous forms of anti-capitalist political organization should not be a cause for despair, but what needs to be left behind is a certain romantic attachment to the politics of failure, to the comfortable position of a defeated marginality. The credit crisis is an opportunity – but it needs to be treated as a tremendous speculative challenge, a spur for a renewal that is not a return. (2009: 79)

The ‘renewal that is not a return’ is dependent upon the coalescence of a strong political agent, a subject that might incorporate old actors like trade unions and social democratic political parties, or form entirely new political organizations. It doesn’t entail any revolution, as it is understood by Marxist orthodoxy, nor a return to a pre-capitalist, premodern condition. It rather represents the emancipatory answer to the pervasive stranglehold of neoliberalism described throughout the book and, indeed, it takes the status quo as a point of departure. In Fisher’s view, the left should appropriate the political space created by neoliberalism over the past 40 years by speaking to the unfulfilled needs and desires that it has produced: a desire for less bureaucracy, less managerialism, and less control and surveillance over work. In this sense, Fisher’s conception of history is undoubtedly linear – there is no space for nostalgic returns, experimental deviations, sideway stops or sudden U-turns. Any alternative should find its constituting elements in the realm of the overwhelming ‘terminal stage of history’ in which we are all currently living.

In recent years, Fisher’s ideas have become one of the foundations of a left-leaning ⁴ ‘accelerationist’ agenda, epitomized by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s ‘Accelerate Manifesto’ published online in 2013 ⁵ and subsequently developed in the monograph ‘Inventing the Future’ (2015). In the online pamphlet, composed of 24 points, the authors lay down their proposal for an ‘alternative modernity’ in which technology, quantification and economic modelling are deployed to establish a new ‘sociotechnical hegemony’, a system that they describe as ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (Srnicek and Williams, 2015). To achieve it, they list three medium-term goals: the formation of a supporting intellectual infrastructure, the achievement of a wide-scale media reform, and the formation of a political subject able to gather the vast array of ‘post-Fordist forms of precarious labor’. ⁶ This political strategy is said to be substantially different with respect to the one most often pursued by the radical left and the social movements that proliferated in the aftermath of the most recent financial crisis. As the authors put it:

We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The choice facing us is severe: either a globalised post-capitalism or a slow fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual crisis, and planetary ecological collapse. (Williams and Srnicek, 2013)

The belief that democratizing technology and accelerating technological progress can bring progressive social change on a global scale has been welcomed with enthusiasm by many leftwing groups and rippled through public debate, generating a vibrant and vivid discussion on how to achieve a ‘post-capitalist’ society and what this might look like.

The accelerationist agenda has also impacted feminist scholarship. For example, the manifesto titled ‘Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation’ published by the collective Laboria Cuboniks celebrates the destructive, and thus creative, force of modernity. And similar to the accelerationist manifesto, Xenofeminists reject grassroots, local politics by juxtaposing it to the accelerationist strategy. Slowing down, decelerating, is described as ‘available only to the few’ and a ‘catastrophe for the many’. ⁷ What is striking is that in both the accelerationist and the Xenofeminist manifestos, the call for experimentalism and for the creation of a ‘broad assemblage’ of political subjects within the left is accompanied by a harsh criticism of direct action in favor of a politics that instead foresees the use of secrecy, verticality and ‘maximal mastery’.

In the accelerationist understanding, ‘fast’ alternatives are opposed to ‘slow’, decelerated, down-scaled ones. A division is cast between those who believe in the necessity to move faster and exploit capitalist progress to its own detriment, and those who, instead, want to decelerate exactly because this constant acceleration makes capitalism an unsustainable system. This artificial demarcation leaves little if any room for synergies between those supporting accelerationism and those practicing direct forms of action labeled by Srnicek and Williams as ‘folk politics’. In addition, because Srnicek and Williams are mostly referring to the Occupy movement when talking about ‘folk politics’, they overlook various other movements that have been mushrooming in the last decade such as autonomous spaces, eco-villages and sustainable transition towns, alternative currency networks, and alternative food networks. In order to appreciate the significance of this oversight and the importance of surmounting the dualism just described, the next section turns to the origins and meaning of prefiguration and prefigurative practices.

III Understanding prefiguration: A holistic approach to progressive social change

Prefigurative politics are politics in the most basic sense: they seek to actualize (a vision of) collective life. Forward looking, yet resolutely present, prefigurative politics activate imagination while reconfiguring lived social relations and the exercise of power. (Brisette, 2016: 116)

Prefiguration comes from the Latin ‘praefigurare’ a verb composed by the prefix ‘prae’ (meaning ‘before’) and ‘figurare’ (meaning ‘to represent’, ‘to depict’). It means literally anticipating or representing something that will happen in the future. In its contemporary political meaning, the term ‘prefiguration’ was first used by the American thinker Carl Boggs in a 1977 essay on workers’ control strategies in the United States. In the essay, the author underlines the need for democratic, local and collective structures able to ‘anticipate the future liberated society’ (Boggs, 1977). The idea that the means of change should not only be consistent with their ends but also strive to embody in the present the type of society envisioned for the future, without necessarily waiting for a revolutionary disruptive event, has traditionally been a point of contention between anarchist and Marxist thinkers (Raekstad, 2018; Van de Sande, 2015, 2018). Though it was not until the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999, and the subsequent wave of mobilizations that began with Occupy Wall Street and were followed by the Arab Spring, that the term ‘prefigurative politics’ really came back to the fore, popularized by the late anthropologist David Graeber:

When protesters in Seattle chanted ‘this is what democracy looks like,’ they meant to be taken literally. In the best tradition of direct action, they not only confronted a certain form of power, exposing its mechanisms and attempting literally to stop it in its tracks: they did it in a way which demonstrated why the kind of social relations on which it is based were unnecessary. […] The diversity was a function of the decentralized form of organization, and this organization was the movement’s ideology. (Graeber, 2004: 84)

This emphasis on decentralized self-organization and the daily (re)production of the collective subjectivities of the activists is guided by a ‘moral and political mandate to match means and ends’ (Hardt and Negri, 2017: 275). In the case of Occupy Wall Street, this resulted in the creation of various encampments in Zuccotti Park that included public kitchens, libraries and facilities which were meant to embody and actualize the ideology of the movement and to materially sustain the mobilization over time. Seen from a global perspective, however, it is evident that these ‘assembly movements’ represent only a small part of the movements that are deploying prefigurative practices. As argued by Paul Raekstad (2018), many contemporary social movements around the world are ‘potentially prefigurative in nature’ (2018: 363), like the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, the network of recuperated factories in Argentina, and the ecological villages and intentional communities scattered across the world’s continents. Many of these movements, albeit differing in their political histories, goals and strategies, blend, to various degrees, contentious action with prefigurative practices.

At this point, it is useful to reflect further on the difference between means and ends – about ideals and visions for the future and the strategies by which we pursue them. When it comes to means (i.e. repertoires of action) prefigurative politics can be found both alone or in combination with other types of actions, be it in the realm of representative democracy (e.g. voting, parliamentary and legal opposition, referendums) or extra-parliamentary politics (e.g. blockades, riots, strikes, demonstrations). Turning to political ends, prefiguration largely aims to challenge and transcend the culture and structures of contemporary capitalism, the capitalist state and representative democracy by embodying a different type of society within the old one. Among the most notable prefigurative movements in recent memory we find the Kurdish project of democratic confederalism to be ‘implemented through communes, academies, councils, and cooperatives’ and intending to go beyond ‘the conventional idea of democracy as representative politics’ to form a stateless democracy (Dirik, 2018: 222–3). Another notable movement comprises ecological villages and intentional communities focused on self-sufficiency and unwilling to engage in any type of confrontational activity with the state. Prefigurative politics, in sum, can be deployed to defend subjects and spaces from capitalist expropriation and exploitation, to restore spaces of former capitalist (re)production, or to create ex novo new collective subjects and spaces through experimentation (Monticelli, 2018: 510).

The growing interest in, and practice of, prefiguration has resulted in the formation of a vibrant, international academic community within the social sciences and humanities. One important example is the formation of a new collective, ‘Women on the Verge’, ⁸ comprised of scholar-activists from the United States, Italy, Mexico, Australia, and the Netherlands and coordinated by the Argentinian scholar Ana Cecilia Dinerstein. Dinerstein belongs to the intellectual tradition of Open Marxism, a current of thought encouraging a greater focus on praxis and a departure from strictly deterministic and positivist views of history typical of Marxism’s more orthodox strands. ⁹ Alongside developing new ways of conceiving and doing research, the collective sets out to engage in an-other kind of critique, a critique that explores unexplored territories with respect to mainstream social science. As Dinnerstein puts it, ‘The realm of possibility refers to things that are not-yet, things whose becoming lurk in the darkness of the present, ready to be activated, enacted, anticipated, made real.’ ¹⁰ In her recent book, Social Sciences for An-Other Politics, Dinerstein articulates these ‘things that are not-yet’ as concrete utopias and shows that by exploring these utopias as a method (Levitas, 2013), ‘capitalist-colonial’ society becomes ‘denaturalized’ from being the only possible existing society to being one of many possible societies (Dinerstein, 2016: 50). In this sense, Dinerstein thinks of prefiguration as entailing both a negation of the status quo and an affirmation of what is possible. Concrete utopias, however, are never detached from the dominance of capitalism and the capitalist state. On the contrary, they develop ‘within, against and beyond’ capitalism (see also Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010). By consequence, concrete utopias are always under the threat of being ‘translated’, i.e. circumscribed, co-opted, appropriated, subsumed (Dinerstein, 2016: 53).

The idea of transcending capitalism by developing alternatives within its cracks is also evident in the work of the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright and his seminal book Envisioning Real Utopias (2010). In the book, he outlines three mechanisms of change: the ruptural system-change (i.e. revolution), the symbiotic system-change (i.e. the one carried out through the compromise between the spheres of exchange, production and politics, typical of social democracy), and the interstitial system-change (i.e. the one occurring in the ‘interstices’ of capitalism through the social and solidarity economy, collectives and cooperatives). ¹¹ Wright dismisses the first mechanism as undesirable (in light of past attempts), the second as ending up reinforcing capitalism, and the third as lacking the force to bring about radical change. His skepticisms regarding the ‘erosion’ of capitalism from within have since been elaborated upon (Wright, 2018). According to Wright, a pivotal role is played by alternative economic relations ‘whose relations of production […] are characterized by democracy, equality, and solidarity’ (2018: 498). To implement them, both bottom-up popular mobilizations and top-down state interventions in the market are crucial. Mobilizations challenging the state should aim at ‘changing the critical features of the rules of the game within which capitalism functions’ (2018: 498). Nonetheless, he describes this strategy as being, at the same time, ‘enticing and far-fetched’: enticing because it gives hope that change can happen, and far-fetched because it underestimates the power of capitalism to incorporate or crush any alternative economic system capable of becoming big enough to threaten it. Following his reasoning, the only realistic option would be the formation of a ‘sufficiently homogeneous subject of history’ – necessarily unified around the values of democracy, equality and solidarity and not just class – to strive for a ‘democratization of democracy’ (Santos, 2007).

At first glance, Dinerstein’s concrete utopias and Wright’s real utopias seem to be similar concepts. Looking more closely though, it becomes clear that their visions are slightly different. The first discernible distinction concerns the role of the state. For the former, the state ‘translates’ concrete utopias realized at the grassroots level either by co-opting them or appropriating them, while for the latter, the state is functional in enabling alternatives (which are focused on the economic sector) to emerge and thrive within the dominant capitalist system. But the differences between Dinerstein’s concrete utopias and Wright’s real utopias are also noticeable at a deeper, epistemological level. In Dinerstein’s view, to transcend capitalism it is not enough to strive for the creation of more spaces in the economy for the implementation of alternatives. It is instead equally, if not more, important to focus on the patterns of social reproduction underlying capitalism; in other words, to ‘denaturalize’ capitalist society through prefiguration. Such a denaturalizing entails reconfiguring needs, shifting values and, in the words of late founding father of eco-socialism Joel Kovel, ‘offsetting the belief-system’ to generate a collective, shared intention ‘that can withstand the power of capital’s force’ (Kovel, 2007: 211). This is in fact why many prefigurative communities around the world call themselves intentional communities: they are organized and structured around shared intentions which are often markedly different than dominant sets of values and beliefs (Kovel, 2007). In his book The Enemy of Nature (2007), Kovel proposes to leave behind a system in which the economy is driven by the exchange value of things and to focus, instead, on use-value and the post-economic ‘intrinsic’ value of things in a ‘transformative and receptive relation to nature’ (2007: 213). This demands a ‘struggle for the qualitative side of things’ that incorporates, at the same time, the control over work and its products with ‘subjectivity, beauty, pleasure, and the spiritual’ (2007: 213).

Looking at many prefigurative social movements and practices such as the above-mentioned confederalist women’s movement in Rojava and intentional communities across the world, it is clear that the struggle for change goes well beyond the political and economic spheres. While these movements share some characteristics with the past generation of the so-called ‘new social movements’, they are best understood when compared with the alter-globalization movement of the late 1990s and Occupy, which both target global social injustices at the macro level, act at the micro/local level, and are highly interconnected transnationally through organizational networks and digital platforms (Monticelli, 2018). Differently than single-issue movements like the environmental movement or the LGBTQ rights movement, in fact, prefigurative social movements emphasize the need to tackle, simultaneously, economic, social and environmental issues. Also, when it comes to their action repertoire it is possible to recognize the presence of a strong prefigurative tendency that outplays the contentious aspect; the focus is on embodying alternatives rather than on the act of protesting. It is an integral, holistic (from the Greek word holos that stands, literally, for ‘whole’) type of approach that seeks to oppose capitalism, understood as the dominant form of life (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018), through experimental practices that allow for autonomy, playfulness and, at the same time, interconnectedness between (and within) other human and non-human beings. I will return to this decisive aspect in Section V. What is enough to note at this point is that albeit its potential to guide a trajectory that transcends capitalism, the critics of prefiguration – such as the accelerationists Srnicek and Williams – reject prefigurative politics and exclude it from any agenda striving to attain progressive social change.

IV Hell is paved with good intentions: Occupy and the critique of prefigurative politics

To further understand the origins and reasons behind what I believe is a damaging polarization, it is necessary to discuss the case of Occupy in greater detail. What makes Occupy the case study par excellence to grasp the critical stances against prefiguration lies in its intrinsic dualistic nature. Occupy shows that the North Atlantic financial crisis has been an incredibly generative moment for a new type of social movement that blends contentious with prefigurative strategies, macro with micro political claims, and party politics with lifestyle politics. Occupy Wall Street (and its transnational spin-off Occupy) identified its enemy as the wealthiest 1% of the global population, as opposed to the remaining 99%, with the statement ‘We are the 99%’. In this sense, similar to the alter-globalization ‘movement of movements’ of the late 1990s, Occupy did not constitute a single-issue, traditional social movement but a platform catering to the malcontent against economic and political elites. A platform able to unify, at least temporarily, and precisely because of its broad encompassing claims, the various divisions within the radical left – from the autonomist to the more orthodox factions. As has been effectively described by Jonathan M. Smucker (2014), Occupy Wall Street seemed to be characterized, since its inception, by ‘two overarching tendencies’: one focusing on contentious politics, i.e. explicitly contesting power (the 1% ) and achieving specific political goals (redistributive politics and more severe regulation of the financial sector and profits deriving from financial activities); the other focused on prefigurative politics, i.e. actualizing the desired future in the present through daily practices such as horizontal decision-making, the construction of encampments, and the use of specific communicative modes such as hand signs during public assemblies. These practices and temporary spaces were considered by some of the activists within the movement as a way to produce democracy processually in the here and now, as demonstrated by the slogan ‘This is what democracy looks like’.

According to Smucker, despite being well balanced and mutually supportive in the beginning, after the first months the clashing priorities between the strategic ‘instrumental’ tendencies and prefigurative ‘expressive’ ones became highly problematic, eventually becoming a source of conflict within the movement, hampering its effectiveness in the political arena and, ultimately, resulting in its progressive dissolution. If, on the one hand, the experience of Occupy failed, among other things, to bring about the disruptive societal change it sought, on the other hand it managed to reignite the fundamental debate about strategies and tactics to achieve progressive social change within progressive left-wing groups. In 2016, one of the Occupy movement founders, Micah White, published the book The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, where, reflecting in hindsight on the movement’s outcomes, he described it as a ‘constructive failure’:

I call Occupy a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in the dominant, and still prevalent, theories on how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to ‘get money out of politics’ and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protests are false. Change won’t happen through old models of activism. […] Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of protest. (White, 2016: 27)

It was indeed Occupy’s inability to translate grievances into definite, clear-cut political demands that attracted much criticism from prominent thinkers. Among them, Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2013) pointed to Occupy’s failure to identify adversarial ‘nodal points of power’ and to form a counter-hegemonic political subject strong enough to haul the conflict into the arena of representative democracy. However, the successful transition from the streets to the ballots was witnessed in the case of Spain and Greece where the political parties Podemos and Syriza formed from the Spanish Indignados movement and the entire spectrum of the Greek radical left protesting against austerity measures. Similarly, in the United States and the UK, activists previously involved in Occupy and the anti-austerity movement became instrumental for the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party (especially through Momentum) and the 2016 campaign run of Bernie Sanders for president of the United States. Hence, Mouffe’s critique of Occupy eventually falls short because it fails to consider and anticipate the possibility of the above-mentioned movements achieving indirect (and somehow unintentional) effects, not during the mobilization itself but in the medium to long term. Indeed, Mouffe herself has recently described Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and the Sanders presidential campaign in 2016 in enthusiastic terms, as examples of the emergence of a ‘leftist populist agenda’ in Europe and in the United States (Mouffe, 2018).

Returning to Occupy, some critics, including Smucker (2014) himself, also describe the prefigurative tendency within the movement as being the expression of its middle-class basis. According to Smucker, it is exactly the socio-economic background and the privileged material circumstances of many activists in advanced capitalist nations that pushes them towards less contentious types of actions, focused more on what he defines as ‘a project of private liberation’ rather than engaging in contestation in ‘the larger common realm of power and politics’ (Smucker, 2014). In other words, prefigurative practices within Occupy have been criticized not only for being an obstacle for the achievement of the movement’s external political goals but also for their inherently exclusionary character. Imaginative self-organizing and radical everyday practices are accused of being a luxury that only people with enough time, health, energy, and wealth can afford.

Along similar critical lines, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi (2018) have been discussing the extent to which social movements deploying prefigurative practices can foster progressive social change and be ‘truly’ emancipatory. To do so, they apply three normative, evaluative criteria: non-domination (of one group over the other), functional sustainability (over time), and democracy (of decisional processes). Fraser and Jaeggi specify that it is when these practices constitute the core of a political program, and not a mere organizational mode, that they fail to comply with the three evaluative criteria. Already in 2013 Fraser had expressed some critical positions regarding anarchism and anarchist practices, described as ignoring the necessity of a ‘two-track’ political system. A ‘two-track’ political system is formed, on one side, by civil society raising grievances and requests, and, on the other, by the public institutions/governing bodies addressing these grievances and (ideally) being held accountable by the public. To Fraser, anarchist and prefigurative practices instead aim at reducing politics to a ‘single-track’ system where these two layers overlap. This to her is problematic because it inevitably ends up replicating the very system these practices aim to overcome. As she so eloquently puts it, a one-track system ‘presupposes that everyone can always act collectively on everything that concerns them […]. In what way and to what extent are a council’s actions accountable to non-participants who are affected by or subjected to its decisions? These “others” are, in effect, the council’s public(s)’ (Fraser, 2013).

This interpretation of prefigurative practices and the other ‘assembly movements’ derives in part from the inability of dominant academic frameworks to understand and provide fitting interpretive lenses for the concept (Brisette, 2016). In fact, these frameworks usually describe social movements as ‘demanding’ and ‘grieving’ with respect to the separate and reified entity that is the state and, whenever these grievances are not taken into account or met, engaging in confrontational, contentious politics. This, in Emily Brisette’s view (2016: 114), creates a dangerous conceptual bifurcation between the state and civil society that resembles Fraser’s ‘two-track’ political system mentioned before. In contrast, prefigurative politics aims at imagining, producing and reproducing, materially, new collective subjects and subjectivities, new democratic modes of participation and decision-making processes: new forms of life. In this way, ‘the discussion is raised up to the question of being’ (Hardt and Negri, 2017: 245). The creation of these new subjectivities is intrinsically a reaction not only to the ideology backed by dominant institutions but also to their functioning and organizing principles. It is the result of a critique addressing both their form and their substantive nature as exemplified by the case of Kurdish confederalism. In this sense, our understanding of what is ‘political’ must be broadened beyond those activities that are directly aiming at overthrowing and overtaking a position of hegemony. The goal of the next section is therefore to demonstrate that prefigurative movements are envisaging change in an ontologically and epistemologically different way with respect to political parties or traditional protest movements. A type of change that remains, nonetheless, fundamentally and intrinsically ‘political’.

V Prefigurative politics: Ontologically and epistemologically different

It goes without saying that in the real world there can be no neat categorization capable of covering all possibilities. If everything has a prefigurative potential, then prefiguration will be scattered over the entire, disorderly surface of the world. […] It is […] also interstitial, in that its agency can be found almost anywhere, according to the unfolding and play of contradictions. (Kovel, 2007: 241)

To understand the ontological and epistemological nature of progressive social change as it is conceived in prefigurative politics, one must reflect on three interrelated features: the mechanism of change, the relationship to (state) power, and the temporality of change.

Prefigurative politics strives to embody alternative forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, belief systems and direct experience. Looking at prefigurative politics through the lenses of feminist political philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s ‘radical materialism’ (or ‘neomaterialism’) is fruitful in that it allows us to grasp the core of its episteme: the ‘political’ is affirmative and immanent and develops within and despite capitalism. Progressive social change is thus achieved through a karst-like mechanism of erosion and, at the same time, affirmation from within. Prefigurative politics grounds change in material reality and experimentalism (Martell, 2018: 442). Indeed, experimentalism is a central feature of prefigurative politics. After being dismissed by Marxist critiques of utopian socialism, the idea has been resuscitated in critical theory by scholars such as Axel Honneth (2018: 53). Similar to Wright’s argument discussed earlier, however, its use is often limited to the realm of economic production and exchange. In contrast, the ontological and epistemological nature of prefiguration digs its roots into radical feminist and ecological thought, in that its focus goes beyond production and is centered on alternative modes of social reproduction and the preservation of life. Prefiguration shares this perspective with the feminist and autonomist theories on the commons for which everyday life, the personal sphere, and the body are arenas of political struggle, and commoning is a means of reclaiming and ‘reenchanting the world’ (Federici, 2019).

Turning to the relationship with power, political parties and protest movements are mostly focused on taking state power whereas in prefiguration power is understood as a possibility, a possibility that takes place through ‘micro-instances that are embodied and interrelated’ (Braidotti, 2019: 87). Following Foucault and Deleuze, power is defined as empowering and creative ‘potentia’ and not coercive ‘potestas’ (2019: 110–111). Prefigurative politics is embodied by a multiplicity of communities belonging to different social and political contexts worldwide, organized and networked differently, each with a distinct belief with respect to if and how to relate to the state and to capitalism. For example, some of the most enduring prefigurative movements and communities have been created by indigenous populations, by refugees and migrants, by LGBTQ activists, and by dismissed workers. Through prefiguration these communities do not demand recognition or redistribution, as Nancy Fraser would put it, rather they affirm their identity and strive to create the material conditions for a more equitable, democratic, and cooperative way of living: it is essentially an endeavor for self-determination, emancipation, and empowerment. ¹²

Understanding the way through which prefigurative politics interacts with (and reacts to) power brings me to the third feature of prefiguration: temporality. The focus of prefigurative politics is undeniably in the immanence of the present moment. This does not imply, though, that the change happens abruptly (Maeckelbergh, 2017). On the contrary, the material creation of infrastructures allowing alternative modes of production and forms of social reproduction requires time, energy, and resources. For this reason, prefigurative politics entails a change that happens in the present but develops processually, immanently, slowly and, because of its karst-like nature, may require time to produce visible changes on a large scale. If we compare it with the change envisaged by the accelerationists, for instance, it is clear their strategy involves a different kind of temporality; accelerationism aims to develop after capitalism has exhausted its energies, utilizing and reconverting its infrastructures. This is why accelerationists call their envisioned society ‘post-capitalist’. It is strategic, in their view, to accelerate the rate at which capitalism is developing to reach a point of no-return and build up the new society from the ruins of the previous one. In my view, as asserted earlier, this vision constitutes a dangerous utopia because it fails to consider the consequences on human and non-human life of pushing capitalist development to its extremes: doing so might lead to the impossibility, at least in certain parts of the world, for life to thrive.

Having sketched these constitutive features – the mechanism of karst-like erosion from within, focus on self-determination, emancipation and empowerment, and processual temporality – it is evident that the understanding of progressive social change by prefigurative politics is ontologically and epistemologically different with respect to how change is conceived in conventional politics and protest movements. This does not mean, though, that prefigurative politics and conventional politics are incompatible. On the contrary, they can mutually reinforce each other. There are ways of taking the best of both worlds. The key is to accept that prefigurative politics cannot bring the type of change sought by political parties or protest movements but it can complement their action with its holistic perspective and its focus on experimentation and materiality. Even the relationship with the state can, under some circumstances, be constructive and prefiguration can, in some cases, positively feed into conventional politics. As discussed before, translation of prefigurative politics often coincides with co-optation or repression. But translation could also entail a positive diffusion and democratization of transformative niche practices supported by political forces that are willing to do so.

One illustrative example of this is the resurgence of radical municipalism. Despite the presence of similar initiatives in many European countries during the first half of the 20th century, radical municipalism has undergone a renaissance as a reaction to the implementation of austerity policies in the aftermath of the 2007–8 financial crisis. Radical municipalism promotes the deployment of participatory democracy in decision-making processes at the municipal level. The ideology of the movement is strongly influenced by the concepts of ‘libertarian municipalism’ and ‘eco-communalism’, coined by American social theorist Murray Bookchin (Biehl, 2015). Programs vary from city to city, but the overall aim is to ‘defend human rights and the common good, to feminize politics and to fight the rise of the far right’ (Fearless Cities, 2018). Radical municipalism gained prominence after Ada Colau was elected major of Barcelona in 2015 and is now constituted by a global network of cities and towns across the world. The movement is growing internationally as demonstrated by the almost 700 municipalities that participated in the 2017 summit ‘Fearless Cities’ organized in Barcelona. These ongoing experimentations, driven by prefigurative imaginaries of what alternative ‘governing political formations’ could look like (Cooper, 2016), show that prefigurative politics has the potential to ignite progressive social change in an inclusive, democratic, and scalable manner (Russell, 2019).

VI Conclusion

The North-Atlantic financial crisis has reinvigorated critical analyses of capitalism and the interest in alternatives, but the debate has not been free from clashing perspectives. On the one hand, accelerationists have come forth with a strategy aimed at exhausting capitalism by pushing it to its limits and reutilizing its infrastructures and technologies. On the other hand, some groups on the left have emphasized the need to oppose capitalism by striving for more localized, ecological and decelerated alternatives to be enacted in the present – within and despite capitalism. For the latter and the concrete utopias they’ve inspired across the world, such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, indigenous communities in Latin America, and the global network of ecovillages and intentional communities, prefiguration is a foundational principle because it conceives progressive social change holistically in a way that is ontologically and epistemologically different with respect to conventional politics. If contemporary capitalism is conceived as an encompassing form of life rather than a mere system of economic production, then the only way to transcend it is by embodying alternative forms of life. Thus, change has to be sought on multiple, interconnected levels – economic, political, cultural, personal, and even spiritual. And this is exactly what prefigurative politics does: experimenting with alternative practices of production and social reproduction, with alternative values and beliefs in a constant process of trial-and-error. Prefiguration cannot be dismissed as a mere project of private liberation or a withdrawal from society.

The multiple crises we are facing on the economic, social, and ecological level require the combination of what I have argued are two mutually reinforcing types of politics: prefigurative politics to imagine and experiment with embodied alternatives, and conventional politics working through the mechanism of representative democracy to counteract hegemonic and regressive forces such as right-wing populism. This synergetic interplay, which is not only possible but necessary, can lead to the diffusion of transformative niche practices such as radical municipalism. In fact, some of the most recent social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement, are recognizing the interconnectedness of socio-economic, racial, reproductive, and ecological struggles, and are blending prefigurative practices with conventional counter-hegemonic tactics. Exploring the interactions and the potential alliances between prefigurative and conventional politics constitutes one of the most promising pathways for achieving progressive social change in the years to come. As a result, in establishing a progressive public philosophy for the next decade and beyond, we must give prefigurative politics the place and the importance it deserves. Only by doing so will this new ‘social philosophy’, as Max Horkheimer would put it, come to be truly radical, emancipatory, and decolonial. A philosophy able to help us envision and embody alternative forms of life.