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Do You Know How to Bleed?
(reincantamentox.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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You you have an example of such theory? To me that smells like something Marxists would falsely claim to discredit the idea.
The slogan "building the new in the shell of the old" goes directly back to the syndicalists of the IWW, who originally used it to describe concrete action in the workplace to establish horizontal decision making structures etc. so that such worker owned cooperatives could prefigurate envisioned changes in larger society.
Prefiguration is also often used in contrast to revolutionary action. I.e. instead of waiting for or trying to instigate a revolution (which is unlikely to happen or at least not where and when you expect it), proponents of prefiguration argue that concrete actions in the here and now are more vital.
I don't read theory about prefigurative politics so no. I don't read much Marxist theory either and for sure not on praxis, which doesn't seem to be doing much better than prefigurative politics.
Nonetheless, I encounter a lot of people using the word in their papers, events, artworks or similar stuff and that's where I see the term used, rather than on theory.
Yeah, and in a way it didn't work. The cooperative movement never had the muscles to establish itself as a new paradigm. I say that as somebody working in cooperatives and doing consultancy for cooperatives. Cooperatives are bubbles of peace in a storm, but they won't stop the storm. They are not different than a TAZ in this sense, with the difference that the cooperative movement is a lot more aware of material conditions and the fact that by itself it will never be able to become the hegemonic form of production.
You could say the same about all leftist activity of the last 100 years or so. I don't find such absolute thinking to be very helpful 🤷
Well, the scarcity of results in the last few decades must put forward the idea that whatever has been tried before, didn't work. The new must be new also in the form of a new paradigm, not just a new methodology. Rejecting the old as unfit includes might include also rejecting the old theory, practices and identities.