Alterglobalization and the Limits of Prefigurative Politics

2014 ◽  
pp. 306-316
Keyword(s):  
Prefigurative Politics

Sustainable Materialism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg ◽  
Luke Craven
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Basic Needs ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
Consumer Responses ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Social Motivations ◽  
Sustainable Fashion ◽  
Prefigurative Politics

A growing number of environmental groups focus on more sustainable practices in everyday life, from the development of new food systems, to community solar, to more sustainable fashion. No longer willing to take part in unsustainable practices and institutions, and not satisfied with either purely individualistic and consumer responses or standard political processes and movement tactics, many activists and groups are increasingly focusing on restructuring everyday practices of the circulation of the basic needs of everyday life. This work labels such action sustainable materialism, and examines the political and social motivations of activists and movement groups involved in this growing and expanding practice. The central argument is that these movements are motivated by four key factors: frustration with the lack of accomplishments on broader environmental policies; a desire for environmental and social justice; an active and material resistance to the power of traditional industries; and a form of sustainability that is attentive to the flow of materials through bodies, communities, economies, and environments. In addition to these motivations, these movements demonstrate such material action as political action, in contrast to existing critiques of new materialism as apolitical or post-political. Overall, sustainable materialism is explored as a set of movements with unique qualities, based in collective rather than individual action, a dedication to local and prefigurative politics, and a demand that sustainability be practiced in everyday life—starting with the materials and flows that provide food, power, clothing, and other basic needs.

Apocalypticism as Radical Realism? On the Dangers and Benefits of Wishful Thinking in Prefigurative Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110184
Author(s):  
Ben Cross
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Wishful Thinking ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Mutual Interest ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
Prefigurative Politics ◽  
Political Question

In this article, I aim to bring apocalypticism and radical realism into conversation, with a view to their mutual interest in prefigurative politics. On one hand, radical realists may worry that an apocalyptic approach to prefigurative politics may be marred by wishful thinking. On the other hand, radical realists can (and sometimes do) acknowledge that wishful thinking is sometimes desirable. I argue that an apocalyptic approach to prefigurative politics suggests one way of guarding against the dangers of wishful thinking, while allowing space for its potential benefits; prefigurativists have reason to pay at least some attention to what Bernard Williams calls ‘The First Political Question’. I will argue for this claim with reference to the case of Omar Aziz, a Syrian activist who played a pivotal role in the construction of local councils in the aftermath of the 2011 protests.

Academic knowledge production and prefigurative politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (267-268) ◽  
pp. 163-167
Author(s):  
Beatriz P. Lorente
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Structural Characteristic ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Means And Ends ◽  
Sociology Of Language ◽  
Prefigurative Politics ◽  
Access Model

Abstract Inequality is the pervasive structural characteristic of academic knowledge production. To dismantle this inequality, the challenge raised by prefigurative politics which is based on an ethos of congruence between means and ends must be taken up by the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. The IJSL’s peer review process, its academic conventions and its access model can potentially be spaces for concrete practices that prefigure parity in academic knowledge production.

Anti, Alternative, and Post: A Review of Post-Growth A Review of Post-Growth Approaches to Radical Transformation in the Global South

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Hollender
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Global South ◽  
System Reform ◽  
Limits To Growth ◽  
Prefigurative Politics ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
Global Systems ◽  
Systems Of Domination

A diverse set of post-growth theories, proposals, and practices are emerging out of dramatically different contexts across the Global South in response to the recognition that the negative impacts of economic growth are rooted in dominant global systems including development, capitalism, and coloniality.  The emergence of post-growth comes after decades of failed attempts by reform-based approaches, such as sustainable development, limits to growth, and alter-globalization, to meet environmental and social objectives.  While reform-based approaches provide important tools for calculating appropriate limits for growth and promoting sustainability agendas, they do not address growth’s embeddedness in dominant systems.  Also, reform measures often neglect the historical and spatial complexities of poverty, inequality, and environmental problems in Southern societies, rendering these approaches inappropriate and/or infeasible.  As a result, a number of radical post-growth theories, including political ecology, post-development, anti-globalization, anti-capitalism, capitalist crisis critique, decolonial theory, and post-ideological anarchism reject system reform and call for the creation of alternatives that address the unique circumstances of the Global South.  Despite having disparate conceptualizations of the global systems of domination, radical post-growth theories largely converge around the politics and processes of change, espousing the construction of ‘alternatives to’ via a series of radical democratic practices including open-endedness, pluriversality, and prefigurative politics.  Through an examination of the academic approaches that engage with post-growth in the Global South, this review will contribute to understanding and potentiating Southern efforts at anti-systemic transformation.  It will reveal how different radical post-growth theories (1) identify and understand the systems of domination responsible for upholding the primacy of economic growth; (2) contemplate Southern contexts and concerns; and (3) foment long-term processes of building anti-systemic alternatives.  It will identify some practical impediments to moving beyond post-growth theories to implementable proposals, policies, and practices, many of which are exemplified by post-extractivist efforts in Peru.

Black Farmers, Agriculture, and Resistance

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Monica M. White
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Collective Agency ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
Agricultural Cooperatives ◽  
Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽  
Food And Agriculture ◽  
Black Farmers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Prefigurative Politics

Most accounts of African Americans’ relationship to the soil focus on oppression and exploitation. This book offers the untold history of Black farmers’ fight to stay on the land in the southern United States, using agricultural cooperatives as a basis for resistance and community self-determination. This chapter introduces slave gardens as resistance, the Colored Farmers Alliance, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and food and agriculture in the civil rights and Black Power movements as precursors to the examples of black agricultural cooperatives in Freedom Farmers. These cooperatives demonstrate what White calls collective agency and community resilience, using the primary strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis. The archival, ethnographic, and interview-based methods of the book are grounded in the African principle of sankofa: investigating the past to understand the present as a basis of forging a future of our own making.

Civic Participation, Prefigurative Politics, and Feminist Organizing in Rural Nicaragua

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anjali Dutt
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
Data Collection And Analysis ◽  
Prefigurative Politics ◽  
Feminist Organizing

This chapter discusses methods of data collection and analysis that can be used to gain deeper understanding of processes of prefiguration. Prefigurative politics can be described as a set of political practices based on the understanding that “the ends a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movements should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or ‘prefigure’ the kind of society they want to bring about” (Leach, 2013 p. 1004). Prefigurative politics therefore entail the practices that are put in place to reflect and work toward achieving a vision that is held by and for a community in connection to a social movement. Focusing on feminist prefiguration to promote women’s civic engagement in rural Nicaragua, I discuss the role of grassroots partnerships as a method of prefiguring a more just and globally inclusive psychology.

Zapatistas and New Ways of Doing Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Stahler-Sholk
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The North ◽  
Zapatista Movement ◽  
Reflective Questions ◽  
Prefigurative Politics

Scholars of Latin American social movements since the 1980s have sought to explain the apparent upswing in cycles of contentious politics, the innovative characteristics of these new movements, and variations in how they interact with or sidestep conventional institutional politics. The regional context for these developments is very different from the postmaterialist conditions said to have spawned European “new social movements” since the 1970s revolving around identity and values, such as ecology, peace, gay rights, and women’s movements. Relevant causal factors for Latin America’s contemporary movements include popular reaction against neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions and brokered by national governments. Another factor was the transition from military authoritarianism in much of the region, inaugurating a struggle between political elites with a liberal-representative vision of democratization and social movements favoring radical/participatory democracy. The era of globalization also brought reexamination of the citizenship pact and of the hegemonic (mestizo) construction of the nation-state, fueling a reinvigoration of indigenous movements, some with their own cosmovisions of buen vivir (living well) that destabilized mainstream notions of the political. The interplay between party-electoral politics and grassroots movement activism took place against the backdrop of the “pink tide” of elected leftist governments, which swept much of the region in the first decade of the 21st century and subsequently appeared to recede. Throughout this period, scholars and activists alike debated whether fundamental change could best be achieved by movements pushing parties and governments to use state power to enact reforms or by movements themselves adopting radically horizontal and inclusive patterns of organizing—“new ways of doing politics”—that would transform society from below. The January 1, 1994, Zapatista uprising among mostly Maya peasants in the poor southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, launched the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, became emblematic of new ways of doing politics from below. What began as a rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN]) quickly morphed into a social movement that both criticized national and global power structures and sought to empower local communities through everyday practices of de facto autonomy. Negotiations with the state over indigenous rights and culture quickly broke down, but the Zapatistas proceeded anyway to develop their own structures of self-government, autonomous education, healthcare, justice, and agrarian and economic relations, among other innovative practices. The Zapatista movement continues to raise important issues such as the role of culture and identity in popular mobilization, the social spaces for organizing in an era of globalization, the new characteristics of movements that practice alternative forms of prefigurative politics, and the possibility of redefining power from below. Scholars of the Zapatista movement have also posed probing self-reflective questions about the adequacy of conventional definitions of politics and Western positivist epistemologies and about the need for decolonizing research in indigenous and other oppressed communities.

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