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Title: Utopianism and Prefiguration
Author: Ruth Kinna
Date: 2016
Language: en
Topics: utopia, utopian, prefiguration, prefigurative politics
Source: Chrostowska, S. and Ingram, J. (eds). Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives. New York, NY: Columbia Univer- sity Press, pp. 198-218. Retrieved from the Loughborough University Institutional Repository.
Notes: This book chapter is from Political Uses of Utopia, edited by Sylwia D. Chrostowska and James D. Ingram.

Ruth Kinna

Utopianism and Prefiguration

For anarchists, utopias are about action. As Uri Gordon argues, utopias

are “umbilically connected to the idea of social revolution”.[1] The

kind of action utopia describes is a matter of debate. This essay

examines how utopian thinking shapes anarchist thought and highlights

some recent shifts in the political uses of utopia. Utopianism is not

treated as an abstract concept or method, nor as a literary genre or

place – because that is not how anarchists have understood the idea.

Utopia, Gordon notes, “has always meant something more than a

hypothetical exercise in designing a perfect society”. As a

revolutionary idea, utopia is instead linked to the principle of

prefiguration.

Prefiguration has been identified as a core concept in contemporary

anarchist thinking and it is increasingly invoked to highlight the

distinctiveness of anarchist practices, actions and movements. In 2011,

two months after the start of Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber

identified prefigurative politics as one of the movement’s four

characteristically anarchist principles, the other three being direct

action, illegalism and the rejection of hierarchy. Hinting at the

utopianism of the concept, he described Occupy as a genuine attempt “to

create the institutions of the new society in the shell of the old”.

Pursuing the idea, he linked prefiguration to the creation of

“democratic General Assemblies”, consensus decision-making and a range

of mutual aid, self-help institutions - including “kitchens, libraries,

clinics, media centres”.[2] The spontaneous emergence of these bodies

and practices attested to the practicality of radical aspirations, in

ways that might be deemed to be at odds with the traditional idea of

utopia as an imaginary realm of ideal non-existence or impossibility.

Yet insofar as actions like Occupy expose the flimsiness of official

dismissals of egalitarian social change, captured in the mantra TINA,

they are also utopian.

While there is little dispute about the centrality of prefiguration in

anarchist literatures, there is considerable variation about the utopian

politics that prefigurative action variously encourages and rules

against. The essay shows how blueprint utopianism (associated with the

mid-nineteenth century utopian socialists) serves as a foil for

contemporary anarchism. It also touches on Abensour’s well-known framing

of ‘utopia as desire’ in order to illustrate the dovetailing of

anti-utopian utopianism with some recent conceptions of anarchist

utopianism. By examining debates about the interrelationship of these

two concepts and, in particular, the continuities and discontinuities in

the history of anarchist thought, it is possible to capture the spectrum

of utopian political practice which prefiguration describes, extending

from a utopian commitment to a sociological framing of alternatives to a

dystopian embrace of a psychology of desiring.

Prefiguration

For Benjamin Franks prefiguration is the principle anarchists use to

assess the legitimacy of actions and he defines concept in terms of a

relationship between ends and means. A core anarchist commitment, he

argues, is that “means have to prefigure ends”.[3] In normative

political theory, the commitment to prefiguration leads anarchists to

reject both consequentialism, the idea that the outcomes of actions are

the proper measures of rightness, and deontology which instead considers

the justness of actions in terms of duty, or conformity with established

norms or laws.[4] Prefiguration, Franks argues, steers anarchists

towards virtue ethics, a position that grounds morality in character or

behaviour and the intentions of actors. In addition, Franks associates

prefiguration with what he terms “pragmatic ethics”. This means that

anarchists reject instrumentalism, or the principle that “the success of

a plan is determined by its efficiency in meeting the objectives”.[5]

Franks associates instrumentalism with Max Weber. However, his elision

of instrumentalism with consequentialism leads him to identify a range

of exponents, from J.S. Mill to Lenin, and even to apply it to doctrines

which seek to decouple the evaluation of action from considerations of

rightness by the substitution of mere “necessity”. Machiavellianism and

Nechaevism are examples. In contrast to this broad body of thought,

anarchist prefiguration collapses the distinction between means and

ends. In terms reminiscent of Gandhi’s anarchist-friendly precept to be

the change you wish to see, Franks argues that actions “embody the forms

of social relation that actors wish to see develop”.[6] The political

implications are that everyday behaviours are central to anarchist

practice and that the choices individuals make in the conduct of their

lives provide a primary locus for anarchist actions. This understanding

is echoed by Cindy Milstein. Prefiguration, she argues, is

the idea that there should be an ethically consistent relationship

between the means and the ends. Means and ends aren’t the same, but

anarchists utilize means that point in the direction of their ends. They

choose action or projects based on how these fit into longer-terms aims.

Anarchists participate in the present in the ways that they would like

to participate, much more fully and with much more self-determination,

in the future – and encourage others to do so as well. Prefigurative

politics thus aligns one’s values to one’s practices...[7]

The priority attached to intention as a standard of rightness is not new

in anarchist thought. The nineteenth-century anarchist Peter Kropotkin

defended the assassins of Alexander II in 1881 in precisely these

terms.[8] Similarly, anarchism has long been associated with the

rejection of instrumentalism: Weber framed his critique of Tolstoy in

terms of the priority anarchists attached to the “ethics of ultimate

ends” over the “ethics of responsibility”.[9] Yet the term

“prefiguration” does not appear in nineteenth century anarchist

discourses, at least not commonly. For some contemporary writers this

absence is significant and its emergence in the last two decades or so

captures sense that there has been a shift in thinking, or perhaps in

emphasis, in contemporary anarchist thought in the post-second war

period.[10] Indeed, some tie the concept tightly to recent activism. The

strong association sometimes made between labour organizing and

historical anarchism, on the one hand, and the dichotomy between social

and lifestyle anarchism, on the other, has encouraged this view (though

proponents of prefiguration overwhelmingly reject the critique of

lifestyle that Murray Bookchin advanced when he cemented this

distinction).[11] To give one example, in “Trying to Occupy Harvard”

Philip Cartelli notes:

Since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, much has been made of its

prefigurative politics — an increasingly popular mode of political

organization and practice among grassroots movements of the Left over

the past half-century that models the kind of democratic society in

which they aspire to live. In my experience, however, such radical

lifestyle politics are more likely to appeal to activists outside of

traditional political groupings such as labor unions or specific issue

and policy-oriented organizations.[12]

Marianne Maeckelbergh offers a similar account, tracking prefiguration

through post-war feminism, “the anti-nuclear and peace movements, the

racial justice movements in the US, anti-colonial and

anti-developmentalism movements in the global South, and later the

do-it-yourself and environmental movements―all of which fed into the

alterglobalization movement that challenged the right of multilateral

organizations (WTO/WB/IMF/G8) to rule the world”.[13] In this context

prefiguration is an expression of counter-cultural politics which

disappeared at the end of the ‘60s to re-emerge in recent

anti-capitalist campaigns. And rather than attach to “anarchism” as such

– a doctrine suggestive of thick ideological commitment and defined

practice – prefiguration is instead linked to practices, free from

specific content. Maeckelbergh finds the contrast in old-style

programmatic politics.

The practices today find their predecessors in movements of the 1960s,

when activists questioned on a large scale the need for a unitary

political program of revolutionary change (in other words, the need to

determine ahead of time the one thing your movement is ‘for’). These

ideas often took the form of practicing ‘participatory democracy’ and

building ‘autonomous’ social relations.[14]

The narrowly workerist assumptions about the character and composition

of the historical movement are contestable. Moreover, the identification

of prefigurative politics with particular waves of activity or forms of

practice betrays a tendency to historicism which is difficult to

reconcile with the types of agency that prefiguration spotlights. The

significance of the means-ends dynamic in prefigurative politics is not

that it maps actions to a prescribed set of approved forms, but that it

rules against judgments based on the consideration of outcomes or, at

least, results determined by anyone other than the “local agent”.[15]

Similarly, the weight attached to the choices that activists make when

engaging in action is not that prefiguration results in moral consensus

or political uniformity, but only that it supports direct action: the

power of transformation is placed in the hands of individuals, acting by

themselves and/or in collaboration with others.

In current discourse, prefiguration is used to describe the creative

power of collective struggles,[16] the project of building of a new

world in the heart of the old, either in the ordinary sense of the word,

as a foreshadowing,[17] or to describe ways in which revolutionary

desires are expressed in respect of the intimate relationship between

social transformation and action in the present.[18] Like Franks, David

Graeber places the commitment to direct action in everyday life at the

heart of prefigurative discourses.[19] Prefiguration is linked to

creativity, subversion, playfulness and to the development of

alternative relationships and ways of living. Prefigurative politics,

Federico Campagna and Emanuele Campiglio argue, “go hand in hand with

the desire for long-term, broad-horizon imagination”; prefiguration is

about “the continuous exercise of testing the imaginary landscapes

against the necessities and the subterranean flows of daily life”.[20]

In all these senses, prefiguration contests the frequent and unthinking

association of anarchism with destruction, and instead stresses the

experimental, productive and innovative characteristics of anarchist

practices that challenge and seek to replace or challenge hierarchical

and oppressive social forms. As Franks argues, prefigurative politics

describes the rejection of vanguardism and the “scientific” certainties

on which revolutionary elitism has been constructed and the repudiation

of the varieties of socialism that vanguard strategies have produced –

classless but nevertheless highly centralized and industrialized

dictatorships.[21] Just as it refuses the imposition of even fleeting,

temporary dictatorial means, prefiguration embraces actions that achieve

nothing more than transitory, momentary gains in autonomy. The local,

direct actions that bring these gains about foster behaviors that are

transformative. In sum, prefiguration rules out certain approaches to

social change, but leaves the specification of behaviours open to

activists. In this respect, and in the context of debates about the

continuities and discontinuities of the historical and modern anarchist

movements, Franks’s approach to prefiguration appears malleable both to

the politics of the nineteenth-century, to post-second war campaigns and

contemporary forms of activism. Nevertheless, as the relationship

between utopianism and prefiguration reveals, the utopianism of the

historical movement appears to rule against this application. In

Franks’s terms, the suspicion is that these forms of utopianism admit a

gap between means and ends, compromising prefiguration by directing

action towards the realization of predetermined goals.

Prefiguration and Utopianism

It is common to find contemporary anarchists describe prefiguration as a

utopian politics. In Anarchism and Its Aspirations Cindy Milstein argues

that envisioning a world “beyond hierarchy” is “part of prefiguration”.

And hinting at the continuity of anarchist thought, she suggests that by

adopting prefigurative politics, contemporary anarchism “retains a

utopian impulse”.[22] Milstein’s defence of anarchist utopianism is

advanced explicitly as a rejection of two other types. Utopia, she

argues, is neither “a thought experiment. Nor is it a blueprint or rigid

plan”. Franks makes a similar point. Prefiguration, he argues, is

compatible with utopianism but he qualifies the ways in which it is so;

and he shares Milstein’s worry is that utopias typically fall into one

of two main types: abstract ideal or blueprint. The first runs counter

to prefiguration by stripping action of practical content and the second

by enforcing an ideal social arrangement that renders prefigurative

engagement impossible. Returning to the dynamic of the means-ends

relationship, Franks argues that the role of utopian thinking cannot be

to delineate the “end” or purpose of action, for this encourages both

consequentialism and statist thinking: both the idea that the prospect

of end mitigates the harms of the means deployed for its achievement

and, in the first place, that the goal can be pre-determined.

The conception of utopianism that Franks and Milstein are most concerned

to resist is the one painted by anti-utopian liberals, which links

utopianism to rigid social planning, moral perfectionism and the

totalitarian determination of individual well-being. In these schemas,

utopians often appear as dangerous fantasists, completely out of touch

with reality and blind to the social costs of their ideals. In critical

literatures on anarchism, this kind of utopianism is typically inscribed

in portraits of Bakunin.[23] Milstein’s response is to treat utopia as a

method linked to practice rather than a descriptor of a social

condition. Anarchist utopianism “dreams up ways to embody its ethics,

and then tries to implement them”.[24] Parecon, Michael Albert’s model

of participatory economics, might be considered an example of this

approach, though it is not an example she cites.[25] Franks follows a

similar tack. In prefigurative politics, he contends, utopia might

illustrate anarchist principles, model their practical operation,

inspire actions or provide a springboard for the development of new

critical discourses, as long as it does not serve as the end itself.

In addition, Franks adds a psychology of action. Anarchist utopianism,

he argues, might be regarded as a myth, comparable to Sorel’s myth of

violence. Like the Sorelian myth, anarchist utopianism is unaffected by

the failure of its achievement:[26] to borrow Milstein’s neat

formulation, “[a]narchists are used to loss”.[27] In this guise, the

myth indicates an eternal willingness to endure the impossibility of

success as a condition of struggle. In addition, anarchist utopianism

shares the Sorelian myth’s irrational qualities, which Franks captures

in the notion of desire. In the light of anti-utopian liberal critique,

the invocation of Sorel appears odd; as Mark Antliff argues, both the

Janus-faced nature of Sorel’s thought and the appeal to anesthetized

violence is deeply problematic. Nevertheless, Antliff’s careful analysis

of Sorel also helps explain why myth remains attractive to contemporary

activists as “a catalyst for revolutionary inspiration”. For Sorel,

Antliff notes, “myths presented the public with a visionary ideal whose

stark contrast with present reality would agitate the masses”. His

invocation of the myth was a marker of the role he attached to emotion

and intuition in social action. It was also a sign of his rejection of

“rational planning” and, more pointedly, the idea, which he associated

with socialist reformism, of using social blueprints to delineate

policies of incremental action.[28]

A strong a tradition of critical anarchist thinking, stretching back to

Proudhon’s refusal of all systems, attests to the anti-utopianism Franks

and Milstein describe. Anarchism's anti-utopianism was cogently

re-stated by Rudolf Rocker.[29] Nevertheless, the association of

anarchism with abstraction and blueprint utopianism infuses a lot of

contemporary anarchist thinking. The title of Christian Marazzi’s

preface to What We Are Fighting For, “Exodus Without Promised Land”

hints at persuasiveness of anarchist self-criticism.[30] More pointedly,

Uri Gordon, Simon Tormey and Saul Newman have advanced the critique and

sought to distance contemporary anarchism from dominant

nineteenth-century doctrines. Kropotkin is often identified as an

exponent of the wrong sort utopianism: a form that is inflexible,

focused on the destination rather than the journey and rooted in

abstract, essentialist conceptions of nature and human flourishing. In

Newman’s recent work, the relevant distinction is between

‘scientific utopianism’, in which a future anarchist society is founded

on scientific and rational principles and will be the inevitable outcome

of a revolution against the state; and another that might be termed

‘utopianism of the here and now’, in which the focus is less on what

happens after the revolution, and more on a transformation of social

relations within the present.[31]

Franks’ discussion of twentieth-century utopian political theory helps

uncover the reason why historical anarchist traditions have been

persistently identified with blueprint utopianism. His view, that

anarchists are more open to engagement with postmodernism than other

types of socialist, (specifically Leninists), because of the fluid

conceptions of utopia that postmodernism supports, points to theoretical

developments in the field of utopian studies. Miguel Abensour’s

scholarship has been extremely influential here. In a recent discussion,

which Newman recommends, Abensour defines utopianism as an idea of

“becoming”, a term he uses to describe an ontological condition linked

to the creativity, individuality and inventiveness of desire. There is a

broad sense in which utopianism captures a particular desire, but it is

not one that can be given content. Persistent utopias, in distinction to

“eternal forms”, designate “a stubborn impulse toward freedom and

justice – the end of domination, of relations of servitude, and of

relations of exploitation”. This impulse is an “orientation toward what

is different, the wish for the advent of a radical alterity here and

now”.[32]

These innovative developments in utopian studies tend to historicise

forms of utopian anti-utopianism, largely in critique of vulgar Marxist

traditions, much in the same way that contemporary activists historicise

prefigurative politics. Yet the divergence of anarchist and Marxist

historical traditions is rarely noted and the result is that the

convergence of anarchist utopianism and contemporary utopian

anti-utopianism is not treated, as Franks argues, as a shift in utopian

thinking, but as a revision of anarchism. Thus for Newman, the

dovetailing informs the rejection of two currents: one which associates

nineteenth-century socialist traditions with workerism and a second that

treats socialism as an enlightenment philosophy which automatically

places utopian visions in a box marked abstraction or blueprint.

However, another reading of history is possible and the openness of

contemporary “here and now” anarchist utopianism to forms of postmodern

thinking which Newman and others link to parallel modifications in

historical anarchism can equally be explained by the critical distance

between anarchist utopian thought and other forms of socialist

utopianism. As David Leopold has argued, the conventional “utopian” and

“anti-utopian” dressing of nineteenth-century socialism conceals

significant differences in the structure of revolutionary political

thought.[33]

In the nineteenth century, arguments about utopianism were often

rehearsed in the context of an extended debate about the role of the

state’s repressive tools as instruments of revolutionary transformation.

Divisions on this issue became markers of ideological commitment.

Anarchists and other anti-authoritarians firmly rejected the idea that

the state’s powers might be used in this way and argued that the

contrary position assumed a model of change that was elitist and

therefore self-defeating. Babeuf and Blanqui were identified as the

progenitors of this strategy. The strategies that anarchists proposed in

response were utopian, but not in the sense in which authoritarians

usually painted utopian traditions – typically by referring to

fantastical and pointless blueprints. The important indicator of

utopianism as an alternative to the elitism of authoritarian socialism

was the expression of anarchist ideals through direct actions that

plotted means consistently to the ends of struggle. For example, in

Bakuninist insurrectionary models of change, the destruction of

individual ownership rights – recorded in land registers – was often

identified as a means of revolutionary change and it mapped to a

particular end: the abolition of private property. The destruction of

the registers was a symbolic act through which the landless rid

themselves of the formal legal protections that supported property

rights and the system of rural exploitation and oppression that they

sanctioned. The idea of the general strike followed a similar logic, but

instead of burning records of property ownership, workers instead took

immediate, direct control of the land and factories and abandon

production for profit. The Tolstoyan model was rather different,

involving multiple individual acts of refusal, in addition to collective

actions, notably to participate in systems of conscription and regimes

of punishment. Here, action was directed towards the realization of

peaceful co-existence and non-violence is the required means. For

Kropotkin revolution had an insurrectionary aspect but it was

underpinned by a principle of collective withdrawal. The ends were

captured in the principle of mutual aid. The appropriate means was the

construction of political, social and economic networks, organized

beyond the reach of the state, which would both ensure that activists

had access to basic necessities in periods of violent repression and

intense combat, and that the social relations capable of sustaining

anarchist practices were brought into being, prior to the state’s

collapse.[34]

Just as anarchists accused authoritarians of focusing on issues of

efficiency or necessity in developing revolutionary strategy – the same

critique that Franks’ attaches to Leninism – they were also wary of

abstraction. In Bakunin’s work the means-end relationship was

underpinned by an understanding of conceptual contestability.

Socialists, he argued, were united in their commitments to “equality,

freedom, justice, human dignity, morality and the well-being of

individuals”. But these were not ends as such, since the meaning of

these abstract ideas was always open to interpretation: they took on a

particular hue when they were “mapped by a few sages or savants”.[35]

The utopian element of his anarchism was filled out by a vision of

ordinary people negotiating conceptual meanings through struggle and the

process of self-organization, having once thrown off the shackles of

their enslavement in a direct act of insurrection. Kropotkin and Gustav

Landauer developed their utopian alternatives through the critique of

socialist theories of history, which they considered abstract.[36] Their

special concern was to highlight the structure of Marx and Engels’

scientific socialism and show that anarchist utopianism stood some

distance from it. Marx, they argued, denied he was a utopian yet he

conjured a vision of the future by rooting socialism in a theory of

change that assimilated prevailing norms, practices and institutional

forms, and ridiculed other, imaginative visions as impractical or

whimsical dreams. The hallmarks of their utopianism were first, the

possibility of working practically towards the realization of a

different politics and second, the space that existed for creative

thought and moral judgment in shaping that politics. In this, Kropotkin

aligned himself with early-century utopian socialists – particularly

with Charles Fourier - both to show the continuity of anarchism with

these traditions and in order to probe the possibilities of realizing a

better (more beautiful, emotionally rich, humane, convivial) future than

the one that history, without intervention, seemed most likely to

otherwise deliver.[37] However, in appealing to conceptions of desire,

he explicitly rejected the phalanstery and the classification of

personality types that Fourier’s science defined.[38]

As Franks suggests, contemporary anarchists recognize an affinity with

forms of utopianism that reject scientism, a pervasive feature of

dominant forms of historical socialism. Yet the consistent feature of

anarchist thinking about utopianism is the prefigurative framing of

social transformation – a framing that in different ways was designed to

challenge principles of certainty and inevitability. Utopia was not held

up as “the end” in the means-ends relationship, but invoked in order to

assert the possibility of different alternatives, each dependent on

direct action and the principle of desire. As utopians, anarchists

elaborated strategies for change consistent with their

anti-authoritarian principles precisely in order to resist unspecified

abstract utopias and blueprints.

Acknowledging the open-textured character of historical anarchist

utopianism and its consistency with contemporary prefigurative politics

suggests a possible recasting of Franks’s conception of prefiguration.

Franks defines prefiguration in dyadic terms and argues that anarchism

collapses the distinction between means and ends. His recognition of the

utopian element in prefigurative politics indicates that prefiguration

describes a triadic relationship and that anarchist utopianism mediates

the means and ends of anarchist action, injecting it with a set of

possibilities that make sense of their ethical inter-relationship. In a

discussion of the Committee of 100, Nicholas Walter made the point in

this way: “unilateral nuclear disarmament as the end, and mass

non-violent action as the means”. The utopian ideas that brought the end

and means into a prefigurative relation was the vision of Britain that

embraced revolutionary solutions to existing social problems, had banned

the bomb, left NATO, disengaged from the Cold War and adopted “positive

neutralism”, rejecting “colonialism abroad and racialism at home”.[39]

Utopianism might have different flavours, but in order to be

prefigurative, anarchist recipes for the cookbooks of the future must

include this ingredient.

Questioning the conjunction of historical anarchism with rigid

utopianism also challenges the contention that the shifts that Franks

observes within utopian studies map neatly to an evolution within

anarchism from abstract or blueprint utopianism, on the one hand, to

“here and now” utopianism on the other. By resetting the relationship

between anarchism and utopian studies it is possible to locate the

significant shifts in the anarchist politics of utopia elsewhere. Even

though there are considerable overlaps between historical and

contemporary forms of prefigurative politics, the detectable change lies

in the psychology of action that Franks refers to in his discussion of

Sorel. In other words, the distancing of contemporary from historical

anarchism has encouraged a move away from positively utopian aspiration

and towards the dystopian framing of utopian desire.

Anarchism and the Political Uses of Utopia

Removing anarchist utopianism from the binominal taxonomies that

distinguish historical, workerist, ideological anarchism from

contemporary anti-ideological horizontalism reveals the existence of a

spectrum of utopian, prefigurative practices and suggests a number of

distinct political uses for utopia in contemporary activism. Utopias

might be fleshed out sociologically at one end of this spectrum and

appear as nebulous possibilities, vehicles for the principle of desire,

at the other. The danger of invoking a harsher historicized

transformation of anarchist utopianism, crystallized in the concept of

prefiguration, is that a particular set of approaches to social change

are valued at the cost of others. Recognizing the spectrum on which

anarchist utopianism rests admits a diversity of prefigurative

practices.

Contemporary literature shows that utopianism supports diversity in

activism. Among the prefigurative practices that contain strongly

sociological currents are a number of grass-roots community projects.

Shaun Chamberlain, for example, describes the “force for a better

future” in a project of community building, fostering a collective

psychology of hopefulness. In a discussion of the Transition movement he

argues, “if despair is perceiving an undesirable future as inevitable,

one glimpse of a realistic, welcome alternative transforms our

despondency into a massive drive to work towards that alternative.”[40]

In a similar spirit, Mark Smith advocates a form of practical utopianism

that models ecological ways of living through the estimation of global

risk.[41] There is at least a hint of Proudhon and Kropotkin in these

approaches and a resounding echo in Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s conception

of utopian possibility:

As Force and Reaon have failed as principles of social change and

political government, I think that we should adopt the point of view of

the tendency, not the point of view of the

will. Tendency is not an ideal, a utopia, it is not the projection of a

rational order that force would eventually implement. Tendency is a

possibility implicated in the present state of things, a possibility

that cannot currently be deployed because the present paradigm of social

relations ... makes such deployment impossible.[42]

Utopias that prioritise psychologies of action often revolve around the

creation of autonomous space and the transformation of every-day social

relationships. Dreams and visions still have a place in these strands of

prefigurative practice. Ben Lear and Ralph Schlembach’s recent

discussion of hope and despair includes a central demand, “luxury for

all”, which is reminiscent of William Morris’s call for wealth and the

abandonment of riches. Utopia provides a way of moving beyond the

despair that capitalism induces by providing a “basis of our hope, not

in capitalist development, but in its confrontation and eventual

abolishment”. Their anti-utopian utopianism bears some other hallmarks

of his utopian romance.

Our hope is ... non-utopian in the sense that we are not in the business

of painting detailed pictures of what a post-capitalist society will

look like. That does not mean that we cannot imagine or experiment with

social relationships that are not dominated by the logic of accumulation

and valorisation ... What we do say when we talk about an alternative is

that we reject the logic of capital. The vision of a post-capitalist

world is not one of paradise; ...we can, and must imagine a future where

the production of wealth is no longer tied to class divisions and the

labour relation.[43]

Nevertheless, a striking trend in prefigurative politics is towards

dystopian escape, rather than utopian achievement. Lear and Schlembach’s

conclusion is that indignation can powerfully be brought bear on change

and that the “unwillingness to imagine bigger political alternatives”

contributes to the “sense of despair and rage” that activists feel. In

other activist writing, the idea is taken a step further. Utopia

captures a boundless politics, but one described negatively as desire to

resist, reject or destroy. Mark Fisher evokes an idea of perpetual

motion, rooted in a psychological drive against death: statis. “As

desiring creatures” Fisher notes “we ourselves are that which disrupts

organic equilibrium”, or the tendency towards regulation, direction and

control.[44]

Paul Goodman’s discussion of utopianism offers a useful way of thinking

about this recasting of prefigurative politics. In a discussion of grief

and anger Goodman linked utopianism to patience. Patience, he argued,

did not mean calm. On the contrary, utopianism was also a trigger for

violent passions: anger, about the obstacles to the realization of

utopian desire and grief, for things understood to be absent through the

identification of that desire. Utopians were patient in the sense that

they were prepared to wait for the emergence of felt desire, through

their anger and grief. This meant that utopian desire always had an

object and it involved effort in the present in order to secure its

attainment – Goodman’s anticipation of prefiguration. In contemporary

activism, the positive value attached to the ability to tap negative

passions – despair, indignation, hatred and particularly rage – does not

suggest that utopian patience has been eclipsed. But their invocation

suggests a narrowing of contemporary anarchist utopianism and in the

notion of prefigurative practices open to activists. John Holloway’s

discussion of anti-capitalist rage captures the mood. His concern is to

channel the forces of destruction rather than confront their negativity:

Break the windows of the banks, shoot the politicians, kill the rich,

hang the bankers from the lampposts. Certainly, all that is very

understandable, but it does not help very much. It is money we must

kill, not its servants. And the only way to kill money is to create

different social cohesions, different ways of coming together, different

ways of doing things. Kill money, kill labour. Here, now.[45]

This most negative casting of means-end relationship remains

prefigurative and is perhaps reminiscent of Bakunin’s famous declaration

that the passion for destruction is a creative passion, too. The

difference is that the righteous expression of rage, indignation or

despair often appears in contemporary literature as a condition of being

rather than of doing. Moreover, it depends on the conjuring of

powerfully dystopian images of existing society, which variously

ensnares, entraps and enslaves individuals. In the light of this

dystopian imagery, the generalized emotions which radicals seek to

release increasingly resemble those that Paul Goodman cautioned against

when he contrasted desire “without its object” and the adoption of “the

role of being angry”, to the desire for something and the ability to

blaze against the obstacles to its achievement. The ends of change are

not only described with deliberate vagueness, even when linked to

practical activities, but the analysis of means is developed as pulling

away, less a pushing toward. Goodman explained the enraging desire to

desire as a sense of lost paradise or the idea of “paradise not yet”,

but rather than endorsing this idea as an impulse to eternal struggle,

as Abensour suggests, he rejected it as a cause of continuous

frustration.[46] The negatively and dystopianism of contemporary

prefiguration changes the focus for action, tends against the

specification of hopes and desires and undercuts the positive charge

that Bakunin excludes in his destructiveness. The power of this imagery

might well help facilitate common actions, masses, occupations and

demonstrations, and the new types of social cohesion that Holloway

advocates, even whilst the ends and means of protest are defined in a

variety of different ways. Yet it is difficult to accommodate the

horizontal practices and behaviours expressed through mutual aid in

protest organizations and community campaigns in these dystopian

frameworks, for they seem to exist “outside” the real world in a manner

that makes their operation appear partial or compromised or impossible.

Linked to a more positively utopian politics, this kind of activity

might support a variety of ends and means and might even remain

indeterminate, but in any of its forms, it would be possible for

everyone – participant and observer, friend and enemy alike – to

appreciate the complex ways in which actions might be designed to

prefigure utopian goals. Looking again at anarchist history helps

uncover some political uses of utopia that might contribute to such an

approach.

[1] Uri Gordon, “Utopia in Contemporary Anarchism” in L. Davis and R.

Kinna (eds), Anarchism and Utopianism, (Manchester: Manchester

University Press), 2009, p. 260.

[2] David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots”, Aljazeera

Opinion 30 November 2011

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html.

Last access 31 Januaruy 2014.

[3] Benjamin Franks, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary

British Anarchisms, (Edinburgh & Oakland: AK Press and Dark Star, 2006),

p. 13.

[4] Franks, pp. 17-18.

[5] Franks, p. 101.

[6] Franks, p. 114.

[7] Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations, (Edinburgh &

Oakland/Washington: AK Press/IAS, 2010), p. 68.

[8] Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Morality”, in Roger Baldwin (ed),

Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York: Dover Books, 1970), p.

100.

[9] On Tolstoy and Weber see Sam Whimster (ed.) Max Weber and the

Culture of Anarchy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).

[10] Prefiguration is a familiar term in English-language anarchism but

it does not feature in Daniel Colson’s Petit Lexique philosophique de

l’anarchisme de Proudhon à Deleuze, (Paris: Librairie Générale

Française, 2001).

[11] Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism of Lifestyle Anarchism: An

Unbridgeable Chasm, (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995).

[12] Philip Cartelli, “Trying to Occupy Harvard”, in the series Occupy,

Anthropology, and the 2011 Global Uprisings, Jeffrey Juris and Maple

Razsa (eds.), Cultural Anthropology, 2012

http://culanth.org/fieldsights/63-occupy-anthropology-and-the-2011-global-uprisings.

Last access 31 January 2014.

[13] Marianne Maeckelbergh “Horizontal Decision-Making across Time and

Place”, Jeffrey Juris and Maple Razsa (eds.), Cultural Anthropology,

2012

http://culanth.org/fieldsights/63-occupy-anthropology-and-the-2011-global-uprisings.

Last access 31 January 2014.

[14] Maeckelbergh “Horizontal Decision-Making across Time and Place”

[15] Franks, p. 114.

[16] Christian Marazzi, “Exodus Without Promised Land”, Preface

Frederico Campagna and Emanuele Campiglio (eds) to What We Are Fighting

For A Radical Collective Manifesto, (London: Pluto Press, 2012), p.

viii-ix.

[17] The Anarchist FAQ talks about “the future in the present”, see the

discussion of blueprints at:

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI2.html. Last access 31 January

2014.

[18] Uri Gordon defines prefigurative politics as a practice: the

“actual implementation and display of anarchist social relations”,

Anarchism and Political Theory: Contemporary Problems, PhD thesis,

University of Oxford, 2007, ch. 3, accessible at

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/Uri_Gordon__Anarchism_and_Political_Theory__Contemporary_Problems.html

Last access 31 Juanuary 2014.

[19] David Graeber, “The New Anarchists”, New Left Review, n° 13,

Jan-Feb 2002, 62; Campagna and Campiglio, “Introduction: What Are We

Struggling For?” in What We Are Fighting For, p. 5.

[20] Campagna and Campiglio, “Introduction: What Are We Struggling For?”

p. 5.

[21] See for example Carl Boggs, “Marxism, prefigurative communism, and

the problem of workers’ control”, at:

http://libcom.org/library/marxism-prefigurative-communism-problem-workers-control-carl-boggs.

[22] Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations, p. 66.

[23] For a recent discussion of liberal anti-utopianism see Lucy

Sargisson, Fool’s Gold: Utopianism in the Twenty-first Century

(Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012, pp. 22-31.

[24] Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations, p. 67.

[25] For a recent, pithy description of Parecon see Michael Albert

“Participatory Economics From Capitalism”, in Campagne and Campiglio

(eds) What We Are Fighting For, pp. 11-17.

[26] Franks, Rebel Alliances, p. 105.

[27] Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations, p. 65.

[28] Mark Antliff, “Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the

Legacy of Georges Sorel”, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies,

Art and Anarchy, 2011, pp. 162-3.

[29] Rocker argued: “Anarchism is no patent solution for all human

problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order (as it has so often been

called), since, on principle, it rejects all absolute schemes and

concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in any definite

final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of

social patterns and human living conditions which are always straining

after higher forms of expression, and to which, for this reason, one

cannot assign any definite terminus nor set any fixed goal.” Rudolf

Rocker, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, online at

https://libcom.org/library/anarcho-syndicalism-rudolf-rocker-chapter-1.

Last access 31 January 2014.

[30] Gordon, “Rethinking Revolutionary Practice”, p. 166; Simon Tormey,

“From Utopian Worlds to Utopian Spaces” Ephemera, 5 (2005), pp. 394-408.

http://www.ephemerajournal.org/issue/organisation-and-politics-social-forums.

Last access 31 January 2014.

[31] Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press), 2011, p. 162.

[32] Miguel Abensour, “Persistent Utopia”. Constellations, 15 (2008),

pp. 406–421.

[33] David Leopold, “The Structure of Marx and Engels’ Considered

Account of Utopian Socialism”, History of Political Thought, 26 (3),

(2005), pp. 443-466.

[34] Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal” in Baldwin

(ed.) Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, p.140.

[35] Michael Bakunin, “Stateless Socialism: Anarchism”, from G.P.

Maximoff (ed) The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, online at

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/stateless.html

[36] Ruth Kinna, “Anarchism and the Politics of Utopia” in Davis and

Kinna (eds) Anarchism and Utopianism, (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 2009), pp. 221-240.

[37] For a discussion of Marx’s utopianism see Leopold “The structure of

Marx and Engels’ considered account of utopian socialism”, and David

Leopold, “Socialism and (the rejection of) Utopia”, Journal of Political

Ideologies, 12 (3), pp. 219-237.

[38] For a discussion of Kropotkin and Fourier see Matthew Adams,

“Rejecting the American Model: Peter Kropotkin’s Radical Communalism”,

History of Political Thought, 35 (2014), pp. 147-173.

[39] Nicholas Walter, “The Committee of 100: Ends and Means” in David

Goodway (ed) Damned Fools in Utopia And Other Writings on Anarchism and

War Resistance, Oakland, CA: PM Press, p. 79.

[40] Shaun Chamberlain “The Struggle for Meaning” in Campagna and

Campiglio (eds.) What We Are Fighting For, p. 45.

[41] Mark J. Smith “Practical Utopianism and Ecological Citizenship”, in

Campagna and Campiglio (eds) What We Are Fighting For, p. 82.

[42] Franco “Bifo” Berardi “The Transversal Function of Disentanglement”

in Campagne and Campiglio, What We Are Fighting For, p. 144. Kropotkin

argued in very similar terms. In “Anarchist Communism” he wrote: “As to

the method followed by the anarchist thinker, it entirely differs from

that followed by the utopists. The anarchist thinker does not resort to

metaphysical conceptions ... to establish what are, in his opinion, the

best conditions for realizing the greatest happiness of humanity ... He

studies society and tries to discover its tendencies ... He

distinguishes between the real wants and tendencies of human

aggregations and the accidents (want of knowledge, migrations, ward,

conquests) which have prevented these tendencies from being satisfied”.

In Baldwin (ed.) Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 47.

[43] Ben Lear and Ralph Schlembach, “If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t

Let You Sleep?” in Alessio Lunghi and Seth Wheeler (eds.), Occupy

Everything: Reflections on why it’s kicking off everywhere, (Brooklyn:

Minor Compositions, n.d.), 43-44.

[44] Mark Fisher “Post-capitalist Desire” in Campagne and Campiglio What

We Are Fighting For, p. 135.

[45] John Holloway, Afterword, in Campagne and Campiglio What We Are

Fighting For, p. 204.

[46] Paul Goodman, “On the Intellectual Inhibition of Grief and Anger”,

Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, (New York: Vintage Books, 1962),

p. 93-109.