The founding constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, written in 1905, contains a phrase that has stayed in anarchist and labour movements for over a century: building the new society in the shell of the old.
It is not a metaphor for waiting. It is a description of what you do right now, today, inside the world as it exists. You do not wait for the conditions to be right. You build, in the present, the relationships and institutions and ways of being together that you want to characterise the future.
This episode is about prefigurative politics — the most practical and the most demanding idea in the entire season. It asks what the twentieth century taught us about what happens when the means don't match the ends. It looks at what the Black Panther Party built with their survival programs, what the Zapatistas have sustained for thirty years in Chiapas, what the workers at Mondragón in the Basque Country built from a failing factory in 1956, and what thirty workers in a factory in Thessaloniki did in 2011 when their bosses walked away: voted 97.5% to keep running it themselves, changed production to ecological soap, and have been making it ever since — while the Greek state has repeatedly tried to evict them.
It also asks the question prefigurative politics has never fully answered: how do you scale horizontal structures without reproducing the hierarchy you were trying to escape? And is scaling even the right goal?
Further reading:
Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010)
Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! (Pluto Press, 2008)
Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy (AK Press, 2017)
Schools for Chiapas — schoolsforchiapas.org
Vio.Me worker cooperative — viome.org
Tags: prefigurative politics, mutual aid, horizontal organisation, IWW, Black Panther Party, survival programs, Zapatistas, Mondragón, cooperatives, Vio.Me, worker self-management, dual power, anarchism, Emma Goldman, Spain 1936, Russian soviets, Sarvodaya, Ubuntu
Show notes:
Building the world inside the shell of the old one
A Thousand Small Fires — Episode 13
Prefigurative politics means building the world you want to live in now, inside the world that already exists. This episode traces what that looks like in practice — from the Panthers' free breakfast programme to a factory in Greece where workers voted to keep making soap after their bosses left.
In this episode:
A question to carry:
What are you already building — and what would it look like if you named it as prefigurative politics?
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