Prefigurative Politics. Paul Raekstad
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of praxis, we argue that developing the right qualities through non-hierarchical formal organisations is necessary for reaching a free, equal, and democratic society. Formal organisational structures are not everything, however. As feminists, antiracists, and others have long pointed out, the personal is political. The political theories of revolutionary leaders are shaped by their personal experiences, even when they have professed themselves to be strictly scientific and objective. That is why we have to understand how different and intersecting social structures shape our experiences of the world in order to be able to change it. We show how this can work using practical examples. Finally, we look at the contested relationship between prefigurative politics and state power and at some common misconceptions and criticisms of prefigurative politics.
(a) Prefigurative Politics Before It Was Named
Since we emphasise the importance of praxis, there is no better way to begin to understand prefigurative politics than to look at some practical examples. People have been practising prefigurative politics for far longer than the term itself has existed. Prefigurative politics is today particularly closely associated with certain strands of socialism, which we will look at in Chapter 2. It was to the politics of these movements that the term ‘prefigurative politics’ in its current sense was first applied in the 1970s. The practice of prefigurative politics, however, is likely as old as politics itself. To see why, we’ll take a brief look at some examples of prefigurative politics that didn’t employ the term.
In fact, we would argue that some of the most significant political movements of the last century have used prefigurative strategies, even if they didn’t speak of them in those terms. One important example is the struggle against colonial occupation, exploitation, and racism. From the Pan-African movement in the Caribbean, North America, Africa and Europe, to the Indian independence movement, activists of the global South have run huge and successful projects to undo colonialism, often using prefigurative tactics. To name just a few examples, Pan-Africanist organisations such as UNIA (the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in 1914 by the Jamaican-born organiser Marcus Garvey) have supported Black-owned businesses as a way for Black populations to become economically independent of white oppressors. Though they didn’t use the term prefigurative, UNIA started implementing a society in which Black people had financial independence directly, by providing financial support to Black-owned ‘cooperative grocery stores, restaurants, laundries, garment factories, dress shops’ (Vincent 1972: 102, cited in Marshall 2018) and much more, and by encouraging Black people to Buy Black. The legacy of this approach lives on today. For example, Black Lives Matter in the US runs a website helping people to locate their nearest Black-owned small businesses as a way to help provide jobs and economic security for Black people as an alternative to systemic marginalisation (www.backingblackbusiness.com). In the 1920s, UNIA had such massive economic clout that it was able to address even the supply chains and transportation systems that Black businesses were reliant on, creating its own transatlantic shipping company, the Black Star Line, which operated three ships carrying cargo and passengers between the US, the Caribbean, Central America and the African continent.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Indian liberation activists struggled against the long-standing and violent British colonial occupation by promoting prefigurative independence projects. The Swaraj (‘self-rule’) movement led by Mahatma Gandhi is most famous for this. Gandhi’s alleged quote ‘Be the change that you wish to see in the world’ (which was most likely not uttered by Gandhi at all, see John 2011) has become something of a slogan of prefigurativism today. While Gandhi is not a good example of prefigurativism for several reasons,2 many other Indian liberation activists have supported the creation of egalitarian schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods in resistance to colonial white supremacy and dispossession of indigenous Indians (Ramnath 2011: 177–87). For instance, Rabindranath Tagore was an independence activist who resisted the colonialism, racism and discrimination of the British Imperial education system in India by founding a college in Santiniketan in West Bengal. The college admitted indigenous Bengalis, taught them in their native language, offered generalist rather than specialist education, and involved students in some of its decision-making – none of which were done in British colonial colleges. Tagore also founded a nearby agricultural school (Sriniketan), which later grew into a whole village that provided both jobs and education for people who had otherwise been excluded from the British education system (Bhattacharya 2014: 5).
From the 1960s onwards, US- and Europe-based liberation movements were often influenced by these practices. The Black Panther Party is one oft-mentioned example, and rightly so. They ran a series of Community Programmes in the 1960s and ’70s, the most famous being the large and successful breakfast programme, which at its high point provided free cooked breakfasts for 10,000 children every morning before school across several cities (Bloom and Martin 2013: ch. 7). While the kids ate their breakfasts cooked by volunteers using ingredients that local supermarkets had been persuaded to donate, the Panthers gave Black History lessons and read out Party messages. These breakfasts were a preview of the kind of society the Panthers were fighting for: a communist society where nobody went hungry, where Black people’s history was not forgotten or marginalised, and where neighbours came together to help each other and socialise, for free. Other Community Programmes included free health clinics, free food and clothing programmes, and a sickle cell anaemia research project. These implemented parts of the vision set out in the Panthers’ ten-point programme: ‘We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society … We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace’ (Black Panther Party 1966).
There were many sides to the Panthers’ strategy, not all of them prefigurative – from patrolling the streets in resistance to police brutality, to educational projects, protests and running for office in local elections. While their Community Programmes are often cited as a quintessential example of prefigurative activism, the Panthers were also an explicitly vanguardist organisation – a term drawn from Marxist-Leninism that often implies a more capable elite leading the movement from above (Clemons and Jones 2001: 29). We should also point out that Huey Newton and other Party leaders were heavily influenced by Maoism, which differs on a number of points from the strands of socialism that are more commonly associated with prefigurative politics (Newton 1974), notably on questions of taking existing state power and the value of vanguard parties. This combination of approaches is a theme that will recur in this book, reflecting the fact that prefigurative politics need not exclude a range of other, non-prefigurative, tactics.
Feminist movements in the 1960s also played a pivotal role in the development of prefigurative politics, as currently understood. The famous slogan ‘the personal is political’ emerged in this era and, as we will see in Chapters 2 and 5, became an important part of prefigurative critiques of certain hierarchically organised social movements fixated on seizing control of the state.3 Feminists highlighted hierarchies, inequalities, and exploitation that go beyond the reach of formal rules and laws. We will look more closely at the theory behind this in later chapters, but when it came to practical action, the personal being political meant that our personal lives and daily behaviours are and should be recognised as an important site of political struggle. This is why, for example, feminists started disobeying repressive gender norms in their daily lives, running skill-shares to teach each other important life skills such as house maintenance and car mechanics, and leaving a fair share of household and care work duties to men, among many other things. Large parts of the contemporary queer movement can be understood as a continuation of this. Many queer activists call for the abolition of patriarchal gender roles and other forms of patriarchal governance, while implementing queerness in their own lives and in their collective organising (for example by refusing to act, look, or identify as the gender they were assigned at birth, or any gender at all). On this radical conception of queerness, being queer is not (only) a personal choice but a commitment to collective resistance to patriarchy, expressed through the prefiguring of non-patriarchal relations, ways of organising, and ways