Submitted by An_Old_Big_Tree in CritiqueThis (edited )
It’s common to hear people say that Marxists and anarchists have the same end goal; full communism, the stateless, moneyless society. Except, they say, the difference is in how they propose we get there!
But that difference itself, the how we get there, is anarchism. Anarchism, with its task of creating the new world in the shell of the old, creating new sets of sociopolitical logics outside of authoritarian ones, has effectively nothing to do with destinations.
Anarchism is a lived ethic in the here and now, one that seeks always to unmake coercive relationships of all kinds, based on a calculated, situated praxis rooted in our needs and desires.
Anarchism has no destination except more anarchism. There is no such thing as “after the revolution” for anarchists, except in the vague sense that there might be a time when state-capitalism is fully dissolved from this world. But even then, anarchists would live their lives in opposition to authority and hierarchising tendencies everywhere. Our stagnancy would mean their rebirth, since anarchism is a kind of becoming, it is movement.
An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote
Similarly, prefiguration is not the process of acting like we would act "after the revolution" - that would mean acting as if classes, race, binary gender and all other forms of hierarchy did not exist. Which makes no sense, though it is useful sometimes as a heuristic for people.
Prefiguration is just the instantiation of anarchist values and logics in the here and now, fully attuned to the details of our very specific contexts.