Prefigurative politics are the modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the group. According to Carl Boggs, who coined the term, the desire is to embody "within the ongoing political practice of a movement those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal". Prefigurativism is the attempt to enact prefigurative politics.
History
Boggs was writing in the 1970s about revolutionary movements in Russia, Italy, Spain, and the US New Left. The concept of prefiguration was further applied by Sheila Rowbotham to the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, by Wini Breines to the US SDS; and by John L. Hammond to the Portuguese Revolution. The politics of prefiguration rejected the centrism and vanguardism of many of the groups and political parties of the 1960s. It is both a politics of creation, and one of breaking with hierarchy. Breines wrote: "The term prefigurative politics may be recognized in counter institutions, demonstrations and the attempt to embody personal and anti-hierarchical values in politics. Participatory democracy was central to prefigurative politics. The crux of prefigurative politics imposed substantial tasks, the central one being to create and sustain within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that "prefigured" and embodied the desired society." Anarchists around the turn of the twentieth century clearly embraced the principle that means used to achieve any end must be consistent with that end, though they apparently did not use the term "prefiguration". For example, James Guillaume, a comrade of Mikhail Bakunin, wrote, "How could one want an equalitarian and free society to issue from authoritarian organisation? It is impossible." The Industrial Workers of the World and various libertarian-socialist and anarchist groups refer to this as "building a new world in the shell of the old". If a group is aiming to eliminate class distinctions, prefigurative politics demands that there be no class distinctions within that group, nor should that group's actions reinforce classism. The same principle applies to hierarchy: if a group is fighting to abolish some or all forms of hierarchy in larger society, prefigurative politics demands they individually and as a group adhere as closely to that goal as possible. The concept of prefiguration later came to be used more widely, especially in relation to movements for participatory democracy. It has especially been applied to the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the US and the anti-globalization movement at the turn of the 21st century.
Perspectives on prefigurative politics
Anthropologist David Graeber in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology described the prefigurative politics of those at the 1999 Seattle WTO protest:
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. This is why all the condescending remarks about the movement being dominated by a bunch of dumb kids with no coherent ideology completely missed the mark. The diversity was a function of the decentralized form of organization, and this organization was the movement’s ideology.
Examples of prefigurative political programs
The global Bahá'í Faith community strives to realise a model of society by developing a pattern of community life and administrative systems in ways which increasingly embody the principles contained in its principles and teachings, which include the oneness of mankind, equality of the sexes, and harmony of science and religion. Several authors have written about the community's grassroots praxis as a living experiment in how to progressively instantiate religious or spiritual teachings in the real world.
The Black Panther Party in the United States was responsible for creating what members referred to as survival programs, including the well-known Free Breakfast for Children Program. These programs were designed to provide food, education, medical care, and clothing for individuals outside of traditional capitalist relations, as well as state-sponsored social service programs. They embodied, at least on a small scale, the kind of self-determination in the black community that the Panthers were working toward on a large scale.
The Community land trust model provides a method of providing cooperatively-owned, resident-controlled permanent housing, outside of the speculative market.
In Argentina, the occupation and recuperation of factories by workers, the organizing of many of the unemployed workers movements, and the creation of popular neighborhood assemblies reflect the participants' desire for horizontalism, which includes equal distribution of power among people, and the creation of new social relationships based on dignity and freedom.
The occupation movements of 2011 in Egypt and the Arab world, in Spain, and in the United States embodied elements of prefiguration. They envisaged creating a public space in the middle of American cities, for political dialogue and achieved some of the attributes of community in providing free food, libraries, medical care, and a place to sleep.
