For those who want a better world, a common question arises: “How do we get there?”. While the path to a libertarian society may seem complicated, one answer has been put forward a long time ago: prefiguration. Although there is much more to cover about the subject, this article offers a brief overview of prefiguration and its relevance to a Participatory Economy.
What is prefiguration?
Prefiguration is a concept originating from historical social movements, particularly anarchism. It is about implementing the values, principles, social relationships, and institutions of a future society in the actions, structures, and organising methods in our current society. In essence, prefiguration involves “living the future now” by establishing scaleable models of the desired society that we aim to create in the present.
“The means by which a social transformation is accomplished must bear the stamp of the new world which we wish to create.”
– Peter Kropotkin (Modern Science and Anarchism)
Key Aspects of Prefiguration
1) Direct Action: Prefigurative politics emphasises direct action as a way to bypass traditional political channels and directly implement change where people self-manage their affairs, make decisions collectively, and operate without hierarchical structures.
2) Unity of Means and Ends: A core tenet of prefiguration is the belief that the means of achieving social change should reflect the desired ends. For example, if the goal is a non-hierarchical society, then the tactics and organisational structures used in the movement should also be non-hierarchical. Here is a video explaining it further:
“The end justifies the means. This saying has been much abused; yet it is in fact the universal guide to conduct. It would, however, be better to say: every end needs its means. Since morality must be sought in the aims, the means is determined.”
– Errico Malatesta (Ends and Means, 1922)
3) Building Alternative Institutions: Prefigurative politics often involves creating and supporting alternative institutions in our current society. Examples include worker cooperatives, anarcho syndicalist unions, community assemblies, participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, networks of assemblies, community land trusts and self-directed education centres.
4) Transforming Social Relationships: Perhaps the most important part is the transformation of everyday social relationships to reflect the society we want to live in. When people participate in prefigurative structures like the ones mentioned above, they transform their underlying values, presuppositions and expectations beyond the current paradigm.
Compare the times when women were the property of men or when they were not allowed to have their own careers. These things are now considered absurd. In the past, most of society, including women, did not expect freedom for women. Now on the other hand, while things aren’t perfect, it is an expectation that all people including women are ‘free’.
This is in a nutshell what prefiguration is about. Through practising freedom, democracy, solidarity and cooperation in institutions a person transforms from one who doesn’t expect freedom or democracy for themselves to someone who feels that it is a central part of them and therefore expects and demands it. To achieve this, it is not about talking to people to convince them; it’s about people practising it themselves. The action leads to changes internally.
“We seek to win by love, by reason, by example, and by experience. Means and ends are but two aspects of the same thing.”
Errico Malatesta (“Anarchy” 1891)
Historical Example of Prefiguration
One of the best examples of prefiguration was during the Spanish Civil War between 1936-39, anarchist organisations and communities in Spain, particularly in Catalonia and Aragon, implemented new institutions on a large scale. Millions of people established self-managed collectives in agriculture and industry, implemented a voucher system in some areas, and made decisions through federations of directly democratic assemblies.
A big reason they were able to do this was because of anarcho syndicalism. Anarcho syndicalism is where a union is the vehicle for change. Internally, while unions fight for the usual things unions do, better working conditions, better pay, etc, the anarcho syndicalist union in Spain internally organised in a self-managed, bottom up federation as much as it was able to under the conditions of the time. By practising self-management in a bottom-up federation, the workers were learning new things about self-management and how to live in a libertarian society so when the time came the workers could take over the industries using a self-managed bottom up federation. This is what happened successfully in Spain.
“The ultimate aim of all revolutionary social change must be a social situation that embodies liberty, equality, and solidarity. If these ends are to be realized, the means used to bring them about must embody the same values.”
– Emma Goldman (What I Believe)
PE and Prefiguration
How can a Participatory Economy be prefigured? Here is a recap of the institutions:
- Self-Managed Workplaces (Plus Balanced Jobs & Income for Sacrifice.) & their Federations
- Consumer Councils & their Federations
- Participatory Planning
- Social Ownership
Self-Managed Workplaces & their Federations
There are at least two ways to prefigure self-managed workplaces; through worker cooperatives and through anarcho syndicalist unions.
Worker cooperatives can be set up, giving workers equal say in decision-making, aligning with the vision’s commitment to self-management and workplace democracy. Workplaces will also be able to experiment with fairer income, taking into account differences in sacrifices made, and balancing jobs to prevent hierarchies forming due to monopolising empowering work, to the extent possible under our current system. syndicalist unions will have to do this internally as best they can under the current circumstances.
Federations can be implemented once an ample amount of workplaces are self-managed. Within federations delegates are accountable, recallable, and rotated. Likewise syndicalist unions can do this internally.
Consumer Councils & their Federations
A prefigurative institution for consumer councils are to set up peoples assemblies and participatory budgeting. These institutions can start by coordinating local projects, such as community gardens, mutual aid networks, where decisions about production and distribution are made collectively by the participants. This mirrors the Participatory Economy’s approach to economic planning, where decisions are driven by those affected rather than by distant managers or market forces. They too can be linked up via a federation of community councils inspired by a nested council participatory political vision.
Participatory Planning
Once federations of both worker cooperatives, syndicate unions and self- managed workplaces are set up on one side and federations of community councils are set up on the other we can then start introducing participatory planning. Both sides can engage in allocation first on a small scale and then on a large scale. It will need to be experimented with to start with, improving it as time goes on. The initial technical infrastructure will need to be prepared first so it is ready to go when the opportunity arises. The Participatory Economy Project has started an initial prototype project for that here: LINK.
Social Ownership
Regarding the commons or social ownership, where everyone owns society’s productive resources, a way to advance this is to have credit unions, land trusts and a funding engine which acquires land and brings it under social ownership.
Challenges of Prefiguration
While prefiguration has been very successful, it is not without its challenges. Prefigurative communities often struggle with financial sustainability, external pressures such as state repression and conflictual internal dynamics, such as tension between those who want to do prefiguration and those who want to engage with existing power structures.
Conclusion
After the Second World War the anarchist movement was decimated and were too few in number to do prefiguration. The left in general doesn’t do prefiguration, instead focusing on elections and working to change the government and existing institutions with reforms. An important question to ask is: Where has it got us? If the left had been focusing on prefiguration, would things be a lot different now?
Ultimately, prefiguration for a Participatory Economy is about changing the way people relate to one another. It’s about setting up institutions for creating an environment for cooperation, solidarity, and democratic participation, so that people embody and become those values that they will expect and demand.
“tomorrow can only grow out of today”
(Errico Malatesta, The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader)
What do you think about prefiguration? Are there more examples of prefigurative institutions that are not mentioned in this article?
So why is prefiguration not a dominant strategy nowadays?
Hi Shujun_Tan.
I think it is because this a core aspect of anarchism and a main strategy of the movement that the rest of the left often does not understand or has never heard of.
Before the Second World War, there were millions of anarchists, and anarchism was the leading school of thought on the left at that time. The anarchists were quite successful in implementing prefiguration during the Spanish Civil War, for example. Unfortunately, after the Second World War, many historians have pointed out that millions of anarchists perished because they were part of the working class sent to fight in the war. Following the war, only a small number of anarchists remained, and the concept of prefiguration faded as a result. Since then, other factions of the left have become dominant and have largely disagreed or ignored with the idea of prefiguration. This is where we find ourselves today.
Why do you think prefiguration not a dominant strategy nowadays?
I see.
I think it is not dominant (aka, not widely used) on the left because I have never heard of this tactic before. But anyway, this tactic is interesting.