Prefigurative politics

An interesting question in movement design is how much to embody the change you wish to see in the world in your pursuit of it.

Examples

• If your movement advocates 8-hour workdays, should you work 8-hour days to build it?
• If you are relentlessly corporate in your pursuit of communism, will you have trouble recruiting cadre?
• Was it an acceptable trade-off for communism that the Bolsheviks were funded by violence in order that their movement could achieve success, or did that cause the dysfunction that followed?
• Should a movement to abolish racial discrimination have racial quotas?
• If you advocate maternity leave, is it a problem if your key organiser cannot meet with your elected representative at a crucial time because of pregnancy?
• Was it a the right move for the Occupy movement to have a leaderless structure?
• Was the defunding of the police movement in the US helped or hindered by the fact that it was led by people who were not themselves at risk of violence?

How much do you offer the benefits of the world you wish to build for everyone to your own staff, and how much does it amplify or compromise that broader mission to do so?

We can imagine many trade-offs in either direction, towards “too much prefiguration” versus “too little”. In Australia, a racial equity organisation with only Anglo-Australian staff would have no credibility and thus reduced impact. Too much prefiguring is a risk factor for accusation of LARPing.

I do not have a grand theory about prefiguration. I just need the terminology bookmarked somewhere, because if we do not have a name for it, we might not even notice it is a trade-off that we need to consider.