 This video is about how large-scale social change happens. That is, it's about revolution. Pre-figurative politics is not an alternative to revolution. It's about what a successful revolution requires. Let's see why. Part one. How does social change happen? How does social change happen? I'm not talking about the odd new sort of law or policy here, but the kind of far-reaching change to our basic institutions that we need if we're ever to survive and deal with global warming much less reach a free, equal and democratic society. A brief look at history tells us the answer. Every present has grown from the past, as every future will have to grow from the present. European feudalism grew from the changing slave society of the crumbling Roman Empire. Capitalism emerged first in England from the change in feudalism. Capitalism was then introduced to the rest of the world either as state-led projects trying to copy and adapt it to their own societies or forced upon people by their invaders and colonizers. After the Bolsheviks came to power in the Soviet Union and secured rule against both the ruling elites and invasion by the major capitalist empires, they too constructed a new society out of the social and technological machinery they had to hand. In all these cases, the revolutions didn't so much invent new things from scratch. Rather, they further developed, generalized and systematized certain things that had already emerged in the earlier form of society. In other words, the figures of the new societies they built were prefigured in those that came before. Surf-like forms of bonded labor emerged within and out of the Roman slave society. Capitalist social relations already existed among merchants in major cities for centuries under feudalism and centrally planned and organized industry existed in many capitalist societies long before central planning as a whole was introduced into the Soviet Union. The Soviets themselves, we should point out, were developed in cities long before the 1917 revolution and in the countryside were often the products of the long-standing peasant communes that had been organizing rural life for ages. What can we learn from this? If we want to reach a future society with different basic institutions than we have now, these institutions need to be developed at least to some degree before we get there. In other words, achieving fundamental social change requires us to prefigure that change in the here and now. Prefigurative politics is the politics of doing that and this is what we'll be talking about in the rest of this video. Part two, the paradox of self-mancipation. Some of the first explicit socialist discussions of prefigurative politics that we know of arose within the first international before the split between Marxists and anarchists. We can think of it as a way of spelling out what Marx's slogan that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves requires in practice. 1868 the Belgian section argued that the international itself carried within itself the institutions of the society of the future. This idea became important to subsequent debates about how the first international should be organized and later filtered into a variety of Marxist and anarchist movements and thinkers. These include Anton Panokok and Antonio Gramsci's writings on praxis workers councils and the party and Mikhail Bakunin's, Eriko Malatesta's and Lucy Parsons's writings on radical unions. Typically, socialists talked about this in terms of the coherence between means and ends. The term prefigurative politics only got slapped onto this idea later by Charles Boggs in 1977. Their ideas are the solution to a problem, sometimes called the paradox of self-emancipation. If we want to introduce a free equal and democratic socialist society, we need people who already have the power or the ability to reorganize society in such a way. We need enough people to be driven to do so and to have the consciousness needed to do so. But the basic institutions we have, capitalism, the state and so on, don't develop these powers, drives or consciousness. Capitalism and good revolutionary theory are certainly important for developing a socialist movement. But they alone cannot teach us how to live and organize in anti-capitalist ways. So how can we ever emancipate ourselves? The answer is that we can do this by developing movements and organizations who themselves embody the kinds of social relations and practices we aim for in a future society. We can emancipate ourselves only if we start building the new society within the shell of the old one. We can begin to prefigure parts or aspects of the new society within the one we have. And the politics of doing this experimentally and deliberately is called prefigurative politics. Part 3. Formal decision-making structures So prefigurative politics is the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here and now. On the level of formal decision-making institutions, where most early socialists focused when they talked about means and coherence, this is usually cashed out in terms of the following institutional features. These are that you make decisions on the lowest practical level by different kinds of majority voting. You use mandated delegates serving limited times. This means that the people you send as delegates will have to vote and argue as you tell them to within the bounds and with the freedom decided by the people they're supposed to represent. These delegates are subject to immediate recall so they can be replaced if and as soon as they don't do what people want. And they are frequently rotated to ensure that as many people as possible participate in the actual running of the organization and you don't end up with a small minority of leaders basically running things continuously. Now there's a bunch of variation and disagreement, for instance about the uses of consensus. Most advocates of prefigurative politics, whether anarchists, Marxists, syndicalists or some mix, have not advocated consensus. Rather, like Marx and the Paris Commune, they favored a delegation system similar to what we just outlined. There are three main arguments for this sort of prefigurative politics. The first argument is that developing revolutionaries with the right powers or capacities to organize society in free, equal and democratic ways is only possible by lots of people learning to do so through practice in institutions that are organized in such ways. The idea here is that people must prepare themselves for revolution and building a new society by participating in activities and practices that are themselves egalitarian, empowering and therefore transformative. For this to succeed, it is essential to build those institutions through which people are able to develop their capacities and make themselves fit to create a new world. The second argument is that if we want people to be really driven towards to need a free, equal and democratic socialist society, the best way of achieving it is by giving them real experiences of what such institutions can be like. To see oneself as an actor, when historically one has been a silent observer, is a fundamental break from the past. This idea is far from new. Already in his early works, Marx noticed these processes among French communist workers. He saw that when communists work when gathered together, there immediately means 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. Smoking, eating, drinking, etc. are no longer means for creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in turn has a society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-born figures. People don't just join socialist movements because they've experienced domination of oppression and exploitation, but also because they think a better world is possible. Pre-figurative politics comes in here because people might join, say, a union to fight for things like better wages and conditions. But in becoming part of the union, they experience new kinds of social relations, and these experiences in turn cause them to change their needs, goals, and desires. They join to fight against certain bad things, and as a result, they start to fight for positive revolutionary social change. The third argument is based on the idea that a successful socialist revolution requires the development of the right sort of consciousness. For both Marxist and anarchists, consciousness isn't something that's magically elevated above the thisworldly realm of human practice. Rather, it's always situated within, and arises within and through particular human practices determined by their social and historical context. If we're right about this, we need to seriously consider how we can create forms of praxis that generate the kinds of consciousness we need to transition to a free, equal, and democratic socialist society. David Graber has talked about how this was employed in the global justice movement and Occupy. We all knew it was practically impossible to convince the average American that the truly democratic society was possible through rhetoric, but it was possible to show them the experience of a thousand or two thousand people making collective decisions without the leadership structure motivated only by principle and solidarity can change one's most fundamental assumptions about what politics, or for that matter human life, could actually be like. The idea here is similar to our point about developing revolutionary drives. By practicing and experiencing a fundamentally different form of social organization, one much more free, equal, democratic, and so on, this will in turn confront people with hard evidence not only that such different forms of social organization are possible, but also with the lived experiences of them working and how much more fulfilling and enjoyable they are. Once you've seen these things for yourself, it's hard to sustain ideas that they're impossible, that they cannot work, that they'll inevitably be terrible to be part of, and so on. And this in turn will inevitably change your views about that and how we can change or replace our society. We can compare this to what Bernard Williams once called the intellectual irreversibility of the Enlightenment. Once this question has been raised, there is no respectable route back from confronting it. Part four, informal hierarchies and the necessity of intersectionality. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, lots of anarchist and Marxist groups did things like create their own emancipatory counterculture, reconstructed their daily lives in various ways, took care to include and organize marginalized people like women, people of color, indigenous people, and so on. But they often didn't talk about this explicitly in terms of prefigurative politics, and their attempts at addressing different informal hierarchies in, for instance, a deeply sexist and racist society, often fell far short of what we think is necessary and what we'd expect today. This started to change during the 20th century. For one, a broad range of anti-racist, decolonial and feminist thinkers and activists have argued that social movements, whether explicitly prefigurative or not, need to address racism, colonialism, sexism, and so on within their movements and organizations if they want to eliminate these things long term. After all, creating free, equal, and democratic social relations requires changing not just form on institutions, but also how our social norms, values, divisions of labor, and other social practices affect our powers and what our organizations are really like. Suppose that you want a meaningfully free, equal, and democratic organization. If some people are systematically ignored and belittled, no matter what they do or say, or some people are always expected to do much more of certain kinds of work, like cooking, cleaning, childcare, and so on, if some people constantly have to deal with derogatory comments, harassment, assaults, and so on, they're not going to be able to participate in running the organization in a meaningful way. They won't be being treated particularly freely or equally. No matter how perfect the formal decision-making structures are, if you have these kinds of informal hierarchies in place, you're not going to be able to have a really democratic organization, or one that gives all its members the practice or experience of real freedom and equality. There's a general point here. If we don't address both formal and informal hierarchies within organizations and movements, we're not going to be able to prefigure the kinds of decision-making much less broader social relations and practices that we want in a free, equal, and democratic future society. How do people address these informal hierarchies? There are many ways. By having distinct caucuses within organizations for different marginalized groups, for instance, distinct caucuses for women or people of color within unions, by constructing organizations, events, materials, etc., that don't exclude certain groups, by empowering marginalized people to participate more effectively through things like workshops, skill shares, and so on, by making members aware of these informal hierarchies and how they operate to help them unlearn them, and many more. There's no single one-size-fits-all to these things, and at the end of the day any movement and organization will have to figure out what works best for them. Part of this has involved challenging the ideological distinction between the personal and the political. On this view, things like what happens in parliaments and government count as political, while things that especially privileged people don't really want to talk about and think about, like how housework and child-rearing is organized, widespread racist practices and attitudes and so on, are labeled merely personal. The familiar function of insisting that something is personal rather than political is to effectively exclude things from critical scrutiny, debate, and deliberate change. The effect of this is often to silence marginalized voices, like women speaking out against marital rape, because this is seen as something personal rather than something political that deserves critical scrutiny and deliberate change. It also ignores the ways in which states have already been intervening in the personal lives of oppressed people in many ways already, from the beginnings of European colonialism to slavery, police harassment, and much more. It's also based on a deeply liberal and anti-socialist view that underestimate how interconnected humans are. We are profoundly shaped by our personal experiences, from how we grow up to our romantic relationships and how we treat each other day to day. And there's no good reason to arbitrarily rule much of this out as things worth critically thinking about and changing if we find them lacking. One of the implications of this is that we need to challenge the common, sometimes explicit, often implicit, idea that we can clearly separate rational analysis off from the messiness of our various motivations and the context that shape them. We need to recognize that the world people are faced with and how they live in it through different practices and their experiences of them shape their background assumptions, which ideas they come up with, what they take to be good justifications, and so on. Your understanding of the world will be shaped by your position in a matrix of intersecting structures. Finally, recognizing the things we've talked about so far should lead us to an intersectional analysis of the problems we're trying to address and the solutions needed to do so. Although we can find similar ideas in earlier thinkers, the term intersectionality first arose within black feminism. The basic idea is that the different kinds of oppression that people face as a result of being a woman, a person of color, a working class person, a disabled person, an LGBT plus person, and so on, will always intertwine and interact in different ways. A result of this is that you can't actually do just say class politics or feminist politics on its own. Even if you say you're going to work just on class, your organization itself will inevitably, de facto, have a politics of race, gender, and so on. It just won't have a very conscious or deliberate one. Something like Lean In might think of itself as just a feminist campaign, but a brief look at them makes it obvious that they have a race, ability, and class politics as well. And they're not very good. If we want large and powerful socialist organizations, one thing we should be doing is trying to include as many working class people as possible. And that means developing politics that empower working class people of different genders, races, abilities, sexual orientations, and so on. There are a number of examples of this working in practice. Even in the far past, when organizations were far worse at this than we want now, syndicalist unions like the Argentinian FORA and the American IWW made sure to organize women, works of color, migrants, and others who were often excluded by other unions. The IWW fought actively and illegally for women's reproductive rights. And we should remember that in virtually every single seizure of power by a Marxist party, a number of measures have been implemented to improve specific things like women's rights and opportunities. Understanding the world is great, but the point, as Marx put it, is to change it. If we know what prefigurative politics is, why it's important, and how people have tried to do it in the past, the really important question for us is, how should we do it now? We don't have all the answers, but we hope that this helps us to start thinking about them. If you want to read more about prefigurative politics, one of us has co-written a book about it that you can find more information about in the description. If you like the video, please like it, share it, and follow our channel. Have a good day!