Anti-austerity between militant materialism and real democracy: exploring pragmatic prefigurativism

Abstract

The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the 'age of austerity' that came after those crises, was and remains in many ways contradictory. Many of the goals of the movement are grounded in concrete material concerns related to inequality, precarity, poverty, welfare conditionality and retrenchment, and the failure, inability or unwillingness of the labour market or the welfare state to provide for the well-being of substantial sections of society within the advanced industrial democracies. This inability of the state or market to meet the requirements of the public is, moreover, compounded by the strikingly similar failure, inability or unwillingness of most formal institutions of representation (especially political parties and trade unions) to react in such a way that they would prompt a reversal of austerity. In this sense, the anti-austerity movement was borne of a pragmatic desperation to achieve material well being through any feasible alternative available. The values that informed much of the antiausterity movement, however, are oftentimes radical and idealistic; influenced by notions of horizontalism, prefigurativism, anarchism, a critique of representation, and the search for a radically democratic society. It is in the context of the so-called 'age of austerity', therefore,

PREFIGURING PRAGMATICALLY? Prefigurative Politics and the Constellation of People Power Strategies for Winning Affordable Housing in Cape Town

“…Such accounts of prefigurative politics tend to position prefiguration as the defining feature of a particular autonomist approach to political life. However, other accounts have sought to demonstrate that social movements can use prefigurative community experimentation without this particular ideological approach (Wright, 2010; Ribera‐Almandoz et al ., 2020). Rather than seeing prefiguration as a ‘way of being’ to the exclusion of other political strategies, prefigurative action may also be viewed as a strategy that can be combined with others.…”

“… Prefigurative power occurs when social movements or alliances engage in community experiments that model their political goal in the practice of their work. This could include a housing organization establishing its own community housing project, an electricity workforce forming an energy cooperative or a democracy movement creating a sustained experiment in ‘real democracy’ (Wright, 2010; Ribera‐Almandoz et al., 2020). Prefigurative power seeks not to tackle the powerful head‐on but rather to demonstrate by example that another way is possible.…”

“…Yet there is a distinct, more strategic approach to prefiguration that is also recognized in the literature and is evident in the work of RTC (Cooper, 2017; Ribera‐Almandoz et al ., 2020; Cohen and Morgan, 2023; Thorpe, 2023; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023). These arguments about prefiguration, often sourced in geography and law rather than social movement theory, suggest that a holistic and consciously autonomist ideological approach is not the only way that prefiguration can be understood and used by movements to generate change.…”

Contesting neoliberalism: Mapping the terrain of social conflict

“…The year 2011 saw an outpouring of global unrest, which many viewed as a reaction to the global economic crisis of 2008 and the related onset of austerity politics, and which was subsequently followed throughout the 2010s by a sustained period of popular protest (Cammaerts 2018; Della Porta & Portos 2020; Giugni & Grasso 2020; Kriesi et al 2020; Mateos & Erro 2021; Worth 2013). The general trends that comprised this new terrain of social conflict have become relatively well known, including a tendency for protests to be staged in public spaces and to be informed by a commitment to direct action and prefigurativism, as well as witnessing the emergence of grassroots-level campaigns that are facilitated by social media and which exist both outside of formal institutions, such as trade unions and left-wing political parties, and sometimes challenges those institutions from within (Della Porta 2017; Ribera-Almandoz et al 2020).…”

Taking the state back out: bringing anarchism back in

“…Likewise, the innumerable mutual aid groups that have sprung up during the Covid-19 pandemic (Solnit, 2020 ), as they did in response to other natural disasters, do so because states fail. Anarchists also shape mainstream union strategy through ‘dual carding’, where anarchists take prominent, but non-factional organising roles in mainstream unions (Ribera-Almandoz et al, 2020 ), building class consciousness from the ground up, as opposed to leading from a vanguard (though these lines can sometimes be blurred).…”