Not Not but Not yet: Present and Future in Prefigurative Politics

Prefigurative politics, the idea of ‘building the new world in the shell of the old’, increasingly forms part of the common sense of radical social and political movements but deserves more careful conceptual analysis. Traditionally, such ideas have been discussed in contrast to ‘strategic’ politics, but this has been challenged by recent scholarship, which has stressed that they can and should be seen as strategic. This article agrees but points to a more fundamental tension rooted in attempting to enact the future in the present. This is discussed through two broad approaches to prefiguration: ends-guided and ends-effacing. The former leads to a practical dilemma between acting to bring about the future and acting as if it has already been achieved. The latter addresses this, but nonetheless requires further articulation of the relationship between present and future action, which the article argues can be achieved by drawing on ideas from critical pedagogy.