Abstract
In order to make sense of contemporary prefigurative movements and their transformative potential, we need a more expansive notion of politics and a more nuanced understanding of ‘the state’ than that found in most North American social movement theory. In this chapter, Brissette traces critics’ failure to register the political nature of prefigurative politics to an underlying conceptual framework that defines politics in relation to existing state structures and reifies the state as a bounded entity distinct from society. Drawing on Marx’s theorization of the state as abstraction to contest this reification, Brissette locates the political nature of prefigurative movements in the process of constituting collective life as a community-in-freedom beyond the state.
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Notes
- 1.
In an early assessment of the Occupy movement, Tarrow (2011) was sympathetic to the movement’s lack of demands and clear ‘political’ identity, but he failed to grasp the movement’s prefigurative nature and instead read the movement as a bid for recognition, a kind of ‘We Are Here!’ moment.
- 2.
Of course there are many scholars who take these dimensions seriously, but these dimensions are not easily systematized and slotted into mechanistic models, and those who analyse them remain largely on the margins of the field of North American social movement studies, despite (in most cases) being closer to the movements they study. For exemplars among North American scholars in addition to Breines and Katsiaficas, see, for example, Epstein (1991), Polletta (2006), Gould (2009), and Dixon (2014).
- 3.
For an example of how one’s theory of the state shapes subjectivities and forms of political action, see Brissette (2015).
- 4.
This is how Martin Luther King, Jr. (2003), for example, understood direct action.
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Brissette, E. (2016). The Prefigurative Is Political: On Politics Beyond ‘The State’. In: Dinerstein, A. (eds) Social Sciences for an Other Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47776-3_8
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