Not Not but Not yet: Present and Future in Prefigurative Politics

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 psychology 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 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 society in the shell of the old’. Thus, John Holloway (2010: 45) describes prefigurative politics 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 embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, 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, prefigurative 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 summarised (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 evasion 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 distant and remote from our own. This tension is discussed in relation to two broad approaches to prefiguration. First, the article considers ‘ends-guided’ prefiguration, which seeks to match action in the present with long distant and reasonably specific ends. This results in a dilemma between attempting to live up to the standards of the desired society and acting in order to bring it into being. The article then discusses ‘ends-effacing’ prefiguration, which responds to this dilemma by shifting focus to action in the present and emphasising how ends and means ought to be seen as of a kind. However, such accounts, for good reason, still maintain some distinction between means and ends, while nonetheless representing ends as provisional and short term. The final section, entitled ‘Revolutionary Rehearsals’ offers an approach, borrowing concepts from critical pedagogy, which tries to clarify how this distinction can be maintained in a way which resists slipping back into the dilemma of ends-guided prefiguration.

Prefiguration and Strategy

It is, to an extent, understandable that prefiguration and strategy have come to be seen as two mutually opposed approaches. Strategy consists of the ordering of specific tactics towards goals. The tactics themselves are subordinate to the overall strategy, gain their meaning solely within it, and the strategy itself is subordinate to the goals. The only question strategists ask is, ‘what works?’ Moreover, strategy is essentially about winning. Strategy is a term of war or at least of competition. On the other hand, for prefigurative politics, no practice is ‘just’ a tactic but always has significance in its own right. In this sense, then, prefigurative politics can be seen as rejecting a narrowly strategic approach which evaluates political events and projects in terms of their immediate outcome or contribution to a strategic project (Van de Sande, 2013: 225). Indeed, one of the motivations behind prefigurative politics is an antidote to the pernicious effects of what Rowbotham (1979) calls the politics of deferment, which perpetually postpones important questions until ‘after the revolution’.

To say that prefigurative politics is not narrowly strategic in this sense, however, is not to say that it is not strategic at all. Such politics are almost always tied to an understanding of social change which is itself strategic and asserts that prefiguration is the best strategy. Those who engage in such projects do so because they believe it is the best way to achieve change – in part because they believe the old ways – whether parliamentary or insurrectionary – have failed. The charge that they are ‘unstrategic’ can often be effectively met with the response that so-called strategic politics is just as, if not more, doomed to failure, because it is liable to be co-opted, create new hierarchies or reproduce old ones. At this point, it is helpful to highlight an important distinction between the prefiguration of specific actions and the prefiguration of certain decision-making processes. Take, for example, Graeber’s account of direct action:

direct action represents a certain ideal – in its purest form probably unattainable. It is a form of action in which certain means and ends become, effectively, indistinguishable; a way of actively engaging with the world to bring about change, in which the form of action – or at least, the organisation of the action – is itself a model for the change one wishes to bring about … At its most elaborate, the structure of one’s own act becomes a kind of micro-utopia, a concrete model for one’s vision of a free society (Graeber, 2009: 210).

This passage contains an ambiguity which is instructive. Graeber (2009: 203), and he is far from alone, clearly holds out hope that the structure of the act itself might form a micro-utopia, rooted in the sense that direct action involves ‘the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free’. However, he also gestures towards an alternate understanding, in which it is not the act itself which prefigures, but the organisation behind the act.

Graeber seems to aspire to both notions of prefiguration, but for many direct prefiguration of actions is impractical, perhaps nonsensical. They thus focus instead on the importance of the deliberative processes involved in organising any given action. It is the democratic processes which should provide a micro-utopia, not the actions they plan. Again, the strong connection between this idea and radical critiques of contemporary society is clear here – contemporary society is said to deny genuine autonomy, or to be undemocratic to some degree, and the goal is thus a richer democracy, the roots of which must be planted now. This is thus consciously contrasted to ‘vanguardist’ conceptions, which believe that such questions can be postponed until after a successful revolution, organised through very different political forms and structures. Instead, and in part in response to the apparent failures of vanguard movements to deliver liberation, these stress a close connection between the democratic processes employed within movements and the societies they seek to build, perhaps encapsulated in the title of Francesca Polletta’s (2002) book Freedom is an Endless Meeting.

While this difference is significant, it is important to stress that both approaches can be, and are, integrated into a strategic project. At the level of individual action, there are a variety of ways that prefiguration can be strategically justified. Perhaps, the most straightforward is the power of moral consistency in providing public justification. In part, this can be traced to a tradition of moral witness inherited from the Christian pacifist tradition (Epstein, 1991: 195–226), but it is not just acts of non-violence that can serve as an inspiration. Much of the tradition of direct action emphasises the importance of exemplary action which can serve as an alternative – Graeber’s micro-utopias. The senses in which such actions are exemplary are diverse and sometimes rather weakly defined. Nonetheless, they broadly serve to demonstrate to a broader public that other ways of living are possible – whether it is through establishing an intentional community, occupying a space and organising it differently or defying a law simply to demonstrate to a broader public that you can, and if you can, they can. It is in this sense that Natasha King (2016) can see acts which consciously defy borders as themselves prefiguring a borderless world.

This emphasis on exemplary activity is present in deliberative and procedural accounts of prefigurative politics as well. In fact, the exemplary role of these practices might be seen as even more important, since they get to the heart of the challenge to contemporary politics. One of the most powerful arguments in favour of the ‘normal’ way of doing things is that it is the only way, with reference to Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ or Churchill’s ‘democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others’, depending on the preferred conservative darling. Both of these express (and ideologically reinforce) a belief that alternative ways of living may sound lovely, but they do not work in practice. Showing that they can work in practice, on some appropriate scale, helps to undermine this belief. In his studies of social centres in Barcelona, Luke Yates stresses that while participants did conceive of themselves as ‘proleptically anticipating social alternatives …’:

[E]normous emphasise was put upon processes of how experiments practically produced wider change through their communication and demonstration … [C]ommunication … was vindicated strategically through its public visibility. Changing oneself, operating as a good example of group living, and modifications to politicise the material order in which one lived were thus seen as component parts of the performance of alternatives to outsiders (Yates, 2015: 11).

Indeed, it is precisely these features which make it possible to speak of these activities as political at all, rather than merely counter-cultural or alternative lifestyles. Of course, the success of these performances is dependent on them actually being both effective and attractive enough to convince, something which is far from always the case. Nonetheless, if it can be shown that certain deliberative methods can get practical results while practising a deeper and richer democracy than is the norm, it helps to push cracks in this consensus.

However, deliberative defences of prefigurative politics can offer at least two other broadly strategic defences of their practice. The first stresses the strategic importance of experimentation. Maeckelbergh stresses how those who engage in prefigurative politics do so because they believe that it is the best and in fact the only way to create the alternative world that they want to see. In particular, she highlights how in the alter-globalisation movement prefigurative politics played a strategic role precisely because of the diversity of goals and openness towards a variety of possible alternatives:

what makes the alterglobalisation movement different from previous movements is that the ‘alternative’ world is not predetermined; it is developed through practice and it is different everywhere. This goal of pursuing ‘(an)other world(s)’ in an open and explicitly not predetermined way requires practice over time, and that is what makes prefiguration the most strategic approach (Maeckelbergh, 2011: 2).

Here, the open-ended and non-prescriptive features of prefigurative politics serve as a strategic response to the needs of uniting people with shared criticisms of existing society but diverse and often vaguely defined priorities and alternatives. This inverts the classical defence of strategic politics as ordering tactics towards a particular goal – if the goal is open and not predetermined, the best tactics are necessarily experimental. Of course, this assumes that the goal is open and not predetermined, a point I will return to below.

The other way in which deliberative processes can be seen as strategic is best described as developmental. Loosely, this can be understood as an answer to the question, ‘How do you expect people to build an alternative society if they never have the chance to live it?’ This stems, in particular, from criticisms of contemporary society as thwarting the development of human potential, particularly through systems of domination and oppression. If potentials are thwarted in current society and realised in a future alternative, then it ought to be possible to trace a path from here to there in which people are given some opportunity to exercise them. Marx can be read as saying something like this when he says that:

a revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew (Marx, 1998: 60).

This passage identifies both a narrowly strategic point – the need to overthrow the ruling class through revolutionary means – and a broader point about development. One reading of this is that if capitalism is to be condemned due to the separation of mental and manual labour such that people are unable to consciously direct their productive activity, and communism will remove this separation, the architects of communism must have spaces in which to ‘try out’ the experience of self-management (see Raekstad, in press). Although this trying out is not identical to communism, it can be understood as a necessary developmental stage towards it.

In sum, while some of the other justifications of prefigurative politics discussed above fall short of claiming necessary conditions, they all make claims that are at least partially strategic in this sense. What is at stake, then, are disagreements over strategy, not between strategy and something else.

Ends-Guided Prefiguration

The above discussion suggests that the distinction between prefigurative and strategic politics obscures more than it reveals. Yet, the very persistence of this debate suggests that there is indeed something at stake. As Richard Gunn notes:

there is, indeed, a sense in which strategic and prefigurative struggle are incompatible. They are conceptually incompatible. Strategic struggle looks (as in a chess game) for means that are effective in reaching a goal. Prefigurative struggle reaches ahead, and involves acting as though the goal concerned had been reached. An attempt to do both of these things results (or can result) in incoherence. If, in the course of a battle, a general acts as though victory has been won, the battle is as good as lost (Wilding et al., 2014).

Gunn identifies this as a conceptual incompatibility between strategic and prefigurative struggle, which is largely resolved at the level of practice. However, it seems better understood as a dilemma constitutive of prefigurative politics itself. These features of reaching ahead and acting as if a goal has already been achieved are definitive of the approach. However, equally definitive is its conviction that a new world must be built which is remote from the existing one. Acting as if victory has been achieved in the full knowledge that it has not yet is the whole point.

One common way of understanding this kind of acting out of the future is through a range of approaches I will call ‘ends-guided prefiguration’. These seek to identify an intimate relationship between the means and ends of political action. A variety of metaphors are employed to describe this relationship, most commonly either embodiment or mirroring, but what they share is a sense that the ends of a given movement must determine its means in a direct and immediate way. Of course, all political action believes that the ends must determine the means to some degree, in the sense that means chosen must plausibly lead to the ends desired. Therefore, ends-guided prefiguration must be distinguished not just from the infamous ‘Jesuit’ principle that distant and good ends justify all and any means but also a pragmatic approach which asks only ‘do these means in fact lead to these ends?’ (see Dewey, 1973). Instead, ends-guided prefiguration asserts a relationship between means and ends which is immediate (or unmediated) – ends and means must mirror each other, rather than connect through a series of mediations.

This idea has obvious appeal, in particular, in connection to ideas of moral witness and public justification. Many people enter political and social movements precisely as a reaction against the apparent hypocrisy of existing politicians, and they instinctively want to hold themselves and those they work with to higher standards, to ‘practise what they preach’. This is particularly prominent in religious-influenced pacifist traditions, for whom the practice of non-violence is as central to their ideas as any particular movement goal. This tradition asserts an important connection between the kind of life appropriate in a kingdom of heaven and that appropriate in earthly life, building on and taking seriously Thomas a Kempis’ injunction to ‘Do now what thou wouldst do then’. These traditions have often woven into broader direct action movements, leading to a broad tradition in which, as Barbara Epstein puts it:

Participants have seen the specific objectives of the movement as inseparable from a vision of an ecologically balanced non-violent, egalitarian society. To most movement activists, a vision of the future is meaningful only if it is acted upon in the present, even if doing so disrupts daily life and produces organisations that often do not function smoothly within a political structure based on different values (Epstein, 1991: 16).

Polletta (2002: 27) cites one influential pacifist minister arguing in the 1950s that ‘the means and the end are so intimately related that it is impossible to get a coordinated and co-operative world by destructive methods that violate personality and increase antagonism and distrust’, while another insists that ‘the movement must live its principles. It must live cooperation’ (Polletta, 2002: 38). Many of these things are echoed in contemporary movements – when Andrej Grubacic (2013: 187–188) argues that a prefigurative vision requires accepting ‘we could not and cannot create freedom through authoritarian means’, there are striking echoes of the Christian pacifist David Hoekema’s (1986) assertion that the doctrine of grace insists that ‘evil demands a response that overcomes rather than compounds evil’.

Such approaches require a fairly substantial shared ideological framework. Polletta notes how much these Christian pacifists, in particular, Quakers, were able to draw on a strong shared theological and ideological framework for their ideas. Indeed, these practices were never really intended as general practices to be encouraged or imposed among others – they did not make sense without a prior knowledge of and commitment to the theology. This, of course, makes sense. If one is to match means to ends, one needs fairly substantive agreement on ends. A notable feature of this approach is that it moves ‘backwards’ from the ends to the means. It is therefore important that the ends are in fact in view, that is, specified to a greater or lesser degree.

Such talk of means and ends in morality begins to raise the figure of Kant, in particular, his formulation of the categorical imperative in terms of a kingdom of ends. Here, structurally at least, we find arguments similar to those invoked in favour of ends-guided prefiguration. Kant makes direct reference to an idealised political community from which it is possible to derive principles of action in the present. In this formulation, the categorical imperative is (re)phrased as ‘act in accordance with the maxims of a member giving universal laws for a merely possible kingdom of ends’ (Kant, 1998: 46). This kingdom of ends is one in which the ends of rational human beings operate in ‘systematic connection’, such that every individual operates as both lawgiver and subject to the law (Kant, 1998: 41). Any given maxim of action can be judged according to its capacity to harmonise with those of others in this kingdom. Moreover, morality (as distinguished from teleology) also involves employing the kingdom of ends as ‘a practical idea for the sake of bringing about, in conformity with this very idea, that which does not exist but which can become real by means of our conduct’ (Kant, 1998: 44). Thus, on this model, a possible, ideal community provides the norms which are necessary to justify and guide action in the present.

In contemporary political theory, this idea lives on in notions of ‘ideal theory’ and the role played by conceptions of ideals in justifying and guiding political practice. Explicitly linking ideal theory with the kingdom of ends, Christine Korsgaard argues for a ‘two-level’ Kantianism that recognises that in non-ideal conditions one needn’t act according to the moral law but instead act in order to bring it about the conditions which make it possible. The kingdom of ends still forms a guide to action, but the character of its guidance changes. It ceases to be a direct exemplar for action in the present and becomes a goal: ‘In evil circumstances, but only then, the Kingdom of Ends may become a goal to seek, rather than an ideal to live up to’ (Korsgaard, 1996: 153).

Korsgaard’s discussion illustrates the dilemma confronted by prefigurative politics that wants to think in ends-guided terms. It is confronted with a choice: attempt to live up to an ideal which is impossible to achieve in societies as they actually are or recognise that such an ideal is merely a goal and work towards achieving it. The former, though, is to risk abandoning the goal of transformation which is at the heart of such projects, that which makes them politics, and not merely alternative lifestyles. Indeed, the more non-ideal the circumstances, the more likely many such groups are to ‘hunker down’ and attempt to live out their ideal in bubbles of splendid isolation (Polletta, 2002: 13). The latter, however, risks collapsing into narrowly strategic or consequentialist thinking, in which means become ‘mere’ means, judged solely on their contribution to achieving a given end, diminishing their significance in their own right. While this has affinities with criticisms of prefigurative politics in terms of strategy, it is important to stress that this is not merely a choice between two ways of doing politics. Rather, these challenges are internal to the idea of ends-guided prefiguration. Conduct in the present is supposed to both live up to and create the standards of a future society which is radically different from it, and this delicate balance appears prone to collapse.

These Kantian concerns seem to be a long way from either the radical pacifist or anarchist traditions. Indeed, Benjamin Franks (2006: 106–114) argues that a consistent anarchist approach should reject both Kantian deontology and its consequentialist alternatives. This is in part due to concerns over narrowly individualistic notions of autonomy and social contract but also its dependence on a distinction between means and ends which he sees prefigurative politics as rejecting. Franks (2006: 118, 134) instead sees the relationship between prefigurative practices and the society they aim at as ‘synecdochic’. A synecdoche is rhetorical device whereby a small part of an object stands in for its whole (in contrast to merely symbolic or metaphorical action, in which something else represents the whole). In this way, ‘Anarchist action embodies a glimpse at the types of social arrangement of a more liberated society’ (Franks, 2006: 134).

This approach can be understood in two ways, hinging on the question of how we know that a given action does, in fact, form part of the desired whole. If the answer is that the anticipated future is known in substantial detail (and thus we can know the ‘synecdoche’ forms part of it and can stand in for it), then this appears simply another way of ‘reading back’ from ends to means and subject to the same dilemma outlined above. On the other hand, Franks (2006: 98–99) seems to suggest that the desired whole is not known in substantial detail and that it is open-ended and experimental. This, however, raises the question of how, without knowledge of the desired whole, we know any given action forms a part of or can stand in for it. Indeed, while Franks (2006: 114) presents this as part of the synecdochic approach, it seems instead to indicate a different model of prefiguration altogether, one which ‘collapse[s] the problematic distinction between means and ends’ entirely (see also Franks, 2010). This model, it seems, does not see means as forming a part of identifiable longer term ends but instead tries to pull means and ends so tightly together that the distinction can no longer be made.

Ends-Effacing Prefiguration

The previous section focused on attempts to inscribe the ends of a movement into its means in a way which recognised and required a relatively clear understanding of ends. However, considering Franks’ position suggested an alternative approach, which stresses a stronger connection between means and ends such that they become almost indistinguishable. Here, the point is not to cast a distant goal and use it as a guide to practice in the present but to turn focus directly to the present and to recognise individual acts as both means and ends at the same time. Such ‘ends-effacing’ accounts represent a different kind of rejection of the politics of deferral – living the future now is not about attempting to live up to a future ideal but simply about living now. Holloway poetically expresses the force of this reaction:

Our time is a time of resistance, of rebellion. It revolts against the time of duration. Duration closes each moment, tells us each moment is a mere continuation of the last, and our time revolts, opens each moment as a moment of possibility, as a moment of possible fulfillment, possible disaster. Instead of building patiently for the future, the non-revolt of revolutionary parties, our revolt is a rebellion against time itself which lifts each moment from the continuity of duration and turns it around, makes it a moment of doing rather than a moment for doing (Holloway, 2010: 234).

Thus, if ends-guided prefiguration is concerned with specifying the future in order to live up to it, ends-effacing prefiguration is concerned with collapsing the future into the present, rather than holding them apart.

It is broadly this conception of prefiguration which dominates much of the contemporary literature on social movements. For Maeckelbergh (2011: 15), ‘Prefiguration posits a cyclical process of social change, in which means become ends, which in turn become the means to other ends, and so on’. Van de Sande also develops an insight of this sort, suggesting that prefigurative politics must be defined by three characteristics:

1) the actualisation of a future ideal in the ‘here and now’, thus bridging a temporal distinction between the two; 2) the experimental characteristics of such an actualisation; and, 3), a reformulation of the means-ends distinction (Van de Sande, 2013: 230).

Importantly, this reformulation of the means–ends distinction is not best understood in terms of consistency: ‘The prefigurative approach is not simply a reformulation of clichéd credos such as “be the change you want” or “practice what you preach”. Rather, in prefigurative action such a distinction between “practising” and “preaching” cannot be made’ (Van de Sande, 2013: 233). Van de Sande identifies all three conditions at work, in particular, in the Occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, which was the centrepiece of the movement which led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2011, and, moreover, suggests that prefiguration offers a framework in which to consider its significance beyond its immediate political consequences – a way to recognise the singular importance of the occupation despite the tragic fate that befell the revolution of which it was part.

These accounts tend to focus on how means can ‘overspill’ and become ends in themselves. Events in Tahrir Square might thus be understood analogously to Marx’s famous remarks about the Paris proletarians:

When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means has become an end … Company, association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them (Marx, 1975: 365).

Here, the point is that what previously appeared as ‘mere’ means appear now as ends in their own right. Ideas (consciously or not) indebted to this are widespread in movements committed to prefigurative politics. To give just one example, Breines (1982: 53) cites an activist in Students for a Democratic Society arguing in 1963 that ‘One cannot divorce means from ends for no other reason than because men’s consciousness and values are shaped at least in part by their actions and their (and others’) perceptions of these actions’.

One crucial advantage of this characterisation of prefiguration is its emphasis on experimentation. Thus, Maeckelbergh identifies experimental openness not only merely as one of prefiguration’s defining features but also as its central strategic advantage. It is precisely because prefiguration’s ends are not fixed that it encourages experimentation, which in turn creates the possibility for stable alternatives to emerge and replace existing structures of power and authority. If nothing is ever mere means or mere ends, movements are forced to shine a light on their own practices and to consider and try out alternatives. The benefits to such experimentation, though perhaps exaggerated, are real. ²

Another connected strength of this approach is that it depends on significantly less pre-existing agreement on goals. While the ends-guided approach discussed above depended on a relatively stable shared conception of the ends of action, an ends-effacing approach is capable of bringing together people with relatively (but not infinitely) diverse ends in experimental projects which begin with a rejection of the present rather than the affirmation of a particular future. In Van de Sande’s (2013: 232) words, prefiguration ‘is not to be confused with the direct realisation of a political programme formulated prior to its implementation: instead, it should be seen as a process in which the objective continuously changes’.

This approach also better brings into focus the temporal concerns of prefigurative politics. While the ends-guided prefiguration sets up a future to be lived up to, this approach shifts focus into the present. In doing so, it also tries to break with a linear conception of time which judges actions solely based on either their contribution to or approximation towards a remote but specific ideal. Maeckelbergh (2011: 4) suggests that ‘Practising prefigurative politics means removing the temporal distinction between the struggle in the present and a goal in the future; instead, the struggle and the goal, the real and the ideal, become one in the present’, while Holloway (2010: 234) describes this in terms of ‘apocalyptic thought’, which ‘focuses on the breaking and transformation of time’. Indeed, the etymology of prefiguration itself is closely bound up with messianic and eschatological notions of time, in which:

the individual, earthly event is not regarded as a definitive self-sufficient reality, nor as a link in a chain of development in which single events or combinations of events perpetually give rise to new events, but viewed primarily in immediate vertical connection with a divine order which encompasses it, which on some future day will itself be concrete reality (Auerbach, 1984: 72). ³

However, such accounts are never able to blot out the future completely. For one thing, movements do, in fact, have ends – in the sense of both goal and termination. They even have final ends, which they conceive of at least as real possibilities, even if these are not specified in terms of specific models of society. Yates stresses that such movements are full of specific goals and are guided by a variety of ends such that:

[A]s a qualifier of prefiguration the ‘means-ends equivalence’ idea is simply not precise enough in any of its permutations. Interaction in any social group or network with shared goals, whether it be a cultural grouping, business or other organisation, is always likely to reflect some overarching ethical and political values to some degree, particularly if one is creative in identifying means and ends (Yates, 2015: 17–18).

Indeed, according to Yates:

it is precisely the inclusion of political ‘perspectives’, and at least one of ‘consolidation’ and ‘diffusion’, which distinguishes prefiguration, as a political approach, from subcultural or counter-cultural projects lacking either a collective vision or preparedness to act in order to change wider society (Yates, 2015: 15).

Moreover, while it seems correct that this ‘overspilling’ is characteristic of a number of social movements, to move from observing the significance of this ‘overspilling’ to identifying means and ends as indistinguishable seems a further, and unwarranted, step. To see how this move is unwarranted, it is worth noting how much this mirrors some of the processes that advocates of prefiguration have rejected. Many such advocates are reacting against a practice of organisation building that lose sight of the goal of social revolution and begin to see organisations as ends in their own right. This is an ‘overspilling’ of entirely the wrong sort, in which means and ends become indistinguishable in an entirely pathological way. ⁴ How, then, to distinguish between appropriate examples of indistinguishability? The answer, it seems, is to shift back to means being guided by ends – but this is to reinstate the distinction that had previously been eroded.

Given this, Yates rightly observes that any sense of ‘homology’ or structural identity between means and ends can only be provisional and context-specific. There does not seem to be any straightforward, univocal sense that means and ends can simply be identical to one another. Some distinction between means and ends remains, even if it is constantly questioned and brought into focus. Advocates of ends-effacing prefiguration are aware of this, something Van de Sande (2013: 232) acknowledges when he suggests, ‘As much as the political objective must be recognisable in the process of its formulation and realisation, these means should not be at odds with the final objective of their application’. The difference between these ends and those involved in ends-guided prefiguration is that they emerge from practice, rather than being set beforehand. They are thus provisional, context-specific and potentially subject to revision and critical examination in the process of their enactment. Thus, ends-effacing prefiguration represents an important advance on ends-guided prefiguration, to the extent that it does not posit remote and long distance ends which are to be either achieved or lived up to. However, to the extent that these approaches still require some distinction between means and ends, we are owed an account of how this distinction might be captured.

Revolutionary Rehearsals

The two approaches to prefigurative politics discussed above represent different ways of thinking about how to enact the future within the present. While ends-guided prefiguration attempts to envision reasonably specific ends in order to match its means to them, ends-effacing prefiguration attempts as far as possible to avoid this, stressing that ends, to the extent they can be meaningfully spoken of at all, are diverse and provisional. This allows it to stress the importance of experimentation and resist having overly determined political goals. Nonetheless, ends-effacing prefiguration does maintain some separation between ends and means and for good reason. The question, then, is how to conceptualise that relationship in a way that makes ends and means distant enough that specific ends can be identified and evaluated, while nonetheless close enough to avoid the dilemma posed by ends-guided prefiguration.

Resources for this can be found if we return to what I referred to above as a developmental justification for prefigurative politics. This sees attempts to embed future practices as playing an essentially formative or educational role in organisations and movements. On this approach, the primary motivation for attempting to embed practices of the future is to enable participants to ‘try out’ and exercise alternative social relations and forms within the course of a movement, in order both to prepare for an alternative and hasten its arrival. An attempt to think through this ‘acting out’ can be found in Brecht De Smet’s attempts to extend Vygotsky’s ideas about education to the sphere of politics. This rests on the concept of prolepsis, an action or context in which a developing subject projects themselves to a later stage of development, and acts as if they have already reached that stage. Proleptic learning ‘anticipates or imagines competence through the representation of a future act or development as already existing’ (De Smet, 2015: 91). Agents, in a sense, assume that something is possible before it is, in order to help make it so. ‘A classic example … is that of a child playing adult roles, projecting itself in a more advanced stage of its own trajectory’ (De Smet, 2015: 52). The extension of this to a radical democratic politics is clear in De Smet’s own examples from the Egyptian Revolution of 2011:

Wildcat strike committees imagine grassroots and independent trade unions; workers’ control over factories illustrate their potential of running the country without capitalists; and practices of participation, election and discussion within the movement foreshadow forms of participatory democracy (De Smet, 2015: 91).

Something like this proleptic anticipation appears to be what John Berger intends when describing mass demonstrations as rehearsals for revolutions. These involve a process of mass gathering which acts to constitute and advance the cause of a collective subject. Berger insists that the significance of a mass demonstration ought not to be seen solely in terms of appeals to authority but as ‘a created event which arbitrarily separates itself from ordinary life’ and this is important since ‘therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities’. Such demonstrations ‘express political ambitions before the political means necessary to realise them have been created. They predict the realisation of their own ambitions and thus may contribute to that realisation, [even if] they cannot themselves achieve them’ (Berger, 1968: 11–12).

This approach, then, sees political action (means) in the present as attempts at enactment of later anticipated forms of action (ends), attempts which are acknowledged as falling short of the desired practices, but at the same time help bring them into being. To the extent that it makes sense to talk about ends at all, these ends do not take the form of a remote and distant alternative but something close enough to be at least attempted (indeed, if the enacted practice is too distant from a subject’s current stage of development, any sense of learning or development will fail). Nonetheless, there remains a difference between the attempt at enactment and its successful realisation. A rehearsal is not the same as ‘the real thing’, even if it might approximate it. It thus makes sense to talk about these attempts as ‘not not, but not yet’ the practices they aim at – they share something in kind but at the same time are recognised as not identical. On the other hand, any given rehearsal might, in an important sense, ‘get it right’, leading to practices which are of lasting and sustained significance (means can ‘overspill’ into ends). This also can help represent how new (proximate) ends can be formulated from within existing practices, since it is possible to identify and elaborate specific ways of doing better through the processes of practical enactment, and attempts to live out a specific practice open the possibility of new ones, including ones that once appeared impossible or unthinkable. Indeed, it is only possible to identify new ends in this way, since it is only from within a given stage of development that it is possible to recognise what is possible to achieve. While it may be possible to look back from the point of view of later stages and identify the contribution of earlier ones, it is not possible to see the entire process in advance.

This approach is not unique to the political traditions most closely associated with prefigurative politics. Indeed, both Berger and De Smet stress the importance of forms of political action and organisation that anarchist and autonomist traditions might reject. However, this approach retains three key features of prefigurative politics. (1) It shares the notion of enacting and embedding practices appropriate to the future in the present, of ‘reaching ahead’ in order to act as if the future has been achieved even while acknowledging it has not. (2) It retains the sense that action in the present should never be understood as mere means and evaluated solely in terms of their contribution to a remote end. While this ‘trying out’ can be represented as a stage in a process of development, each stage nonetheless has significance in its own right. Each trying out is an achievement, an opportunity to develop and learn and possibly also to open new directions of development. (3) It recognises ends and means as distinct but still of a kind. Means and ends are not identical, and it is possible to pick out specific ends, but they remain of the same ‘substance’ or type, and whatever is valuable about the ends is also present in the means. These three components capture much of what makes prefigurative politics distinct and attractive as an alternative to narrowly strategic approaches.

It is useful to compare this with Franks’ treatment of prefigurative action as ‘synecdoches’ of broader wholes discussed above. This is, in particular, an attempt to capture the third feature of prefigurative politics, the sense that present and future action must be seen as importantly of the same ‘substance’ or type. Above I suggested that this approach hinged on how much of the whole is known in advance, since this determines how well we can know if a given action does, in fact, form a part of it and can stand in for it. In contrast, seeing means as proleptic does not require making the claim that they form any necessary part of a specific goal. A proleptic projection, in the form of a ‘rehearsal’ or ‘trying out’, is of a kind with the ends anticipated, but it is not a small part of it that stands in for the whole. It may in fact end up so revised and reconfigured that it forms no part of later ends.

This difference can have practical consequences. In the previous section, I mentioned the concern that means might outstrip ends in a pathological way, fetishising organisational forms and placing them above question. Writing in the context of the wave of occupations of public space from 2011 onwards, Jacob Blumenfeld (2013: 244–245) expresses this fear: ‘occupations themselves become the obstacle to overcome when they are taken as the one prefigurative form’ above all others, insisting that occupations be seen as ‘the material announcement of [a]revolutionary horizon, but not yet its accomplishment’ (Blumenfeld, 2013: 244–245). Thinking about this in terms of proleptic ‘reaching ahead’ can do justice to this idea – seeing an occupation as a rehearsal, designed to test and recognise possibilities, helps recognise its provisional character. On the other hand, seeing it as already a ‘synecdochic’ part of a desired whole increases the risk of seeing it as an undisputable and essential form of action. It risks, in short, a synecdoche becoming a fetish, in which a part no longer stands in for a whole, but is mistaken for it.

Moreover, conceiving such projects in terms of collective learning can be seen as providing resources to both recognise and overcome heirarchies within such movements. Polletta argues that thinking in pedagogical terms can help to form a ‘complex inequality’ since a:

pedagogical relationship – especially one between adults – rests on certain assumptions that minimize the disparities in authority: that the student has expertise and authority in areas outside the curriculum; that the relationship should move toward one of fuller equality as the student gains the knowledge and skills that the teacher has … the inequality in the relationship is domain specific, limited in duration, and mitigated by the parties’ mutual dependence (Polletta, 2002: 75).

Such relationships are not perfect and can be marked by troubling heirarchies, and by an assumed superiority and inferiority in which some need education and others do not. Even worse, if the teachers are conceived of as knowing the entire process of development from start to finish, this risks collapsing entirely into an ends-guided approach. However, among communities and groups already committed to a project of collective and relatively open-ended development, a pedagogical relationship that recognises the need and potential for development while affirming a radical underlying equality (e.g. those offered by Blunden (2010) and Rancière (1991)) can provide a valuable way of thinking through the very real inequalities that exist within even the most egalitarian and anti-hierarchical arrangements. While this is not a problem of prefigurative politics per se, it is certainly one confronted by organisations and groupings committed to it (Polletta, 2002: 217–221).

None of this is to say that conceptualising prefigurative action in terms of prolepsis provides a guide to action in all practical situations. It would certainly be wrong to think that one could read off from this any easy or straightforward answers to be applied in all circumstances. It is, by its nature, highly context-specific, dependent as much on the specific agents and conditions of a given political campaign or movement. Nonetheless, it offers an approach which can help develop the central strengths of means-effacing prefiguration – its commitment to experimentation and resistance to pre-determined political goals – while at the same time maintaining a distinction between present and future action (or means and ends) that does not lapse into the practical dilemmas of ends-guided prefiguration. This is in part because it attempts to conceptualise the issue at the heart of prefigurative politics – how to represent action in the present as both intimately connected to future alternative practices, while nonetheless distinct from them, to see the present as not not, but not yet, the future.