Mathijs Van De Sande

In the wake of the assembly movements that emerged from 2011 onwards, a lively academic and activist debate developed around the question of organization. Various political theorists have proposed an ‘ecological’ approach to social movements, which allows us to perceive them as contingent combinations between various activist repertoires and organizational forms. Rather than prioritizing either a ‘horizontalist’ or ‘verticalist’ logic of organization, both are often at play within a social movement, where they compete with or complement each other. This article contributes to this ‘ecological turn’ in social movement studies by adding a historical perspective. We argue that a key revolutionary event – the Paris Commune of 1871 – could be read as a ‘distributed ecology’. This historical application allows us to better recognize the merits of an ecological approach for contemporary radical-democratic theory and practices and helps us to appreciate the significance and radical potential of recent social movements.

A raíz de los movimientos asamblearios como Occupy Wall Street, el concepto de prefiguración ha ganado mayor atención en la teoría política radical. Sin embargo, sigue sin ser suficientemente teorizada la forma y el grado en que la prefiguración implica a menudo una reivindicación territorial como una vía para distanciarse de las relaciones de poder e instituciones existentes. Este artículo busca establecer esta relación entre la prefiguración y la apropiación del espacio. En primer lugar, rastrea la idea de prefiguración como estrategia revolucionaria hasta la Comuna de París de 1871 y reconstruye cómo esta experiencia provocó una división dentro del movimiento obrero internacional. A continuación, distingue entre la prefiguración y el poder dual introducido por Lenin, argumentando que este último no posee la misma connotación territorial. Finalmente, el artículo examina un ejemplo contemporáneo de política prefigurativa sustentada en una reivindicación territorial: la zad o zone à défendre en Notre-Dame-des-Landes.

This article conceptualizes some of the political practices and discourses that characterize recent protest movements such as Occupy and the Indignados. These movements’ strategies are distinguished by the central role they give to the occupation and recomposition of public spaces and also by their refusal to engage with 10 representative politics and public institutions. Critics argue that this so-called strategy of withdrawal illustrates a categorical misunderstanding of the political. But as notions such as “withdrawal” or “exodus” give only a rather partial account of these movements’ practices and discourses, this paper aims to introduce an alternative, contemporary concept that has a much stronger explanatory potential: 15 “prefiguration” or “prefigurative politics.” In order to flesh out and apply this concept, it reconstructs the political ontologies of two radical traditions that significantly influenced more recent protest movements—namely, early anarchism with its antithetic dialectics and contemporary autonomist Marxism.

Only one year after the global wave of protest movements and revolts—starting with the ‘Arab Spring’, then, subsequently, the Indignados movement and Occupy- our appreciation of such movements turned sour. The aim of this contribution is to question the predominantly sceptical and defeatist discourse on these movements. One element central to many defeatist discourses on the 2011 movements, is the way in which a lack of demonstrable ‘outcomes’ or ‘successes’ is retrospectively ascribed to them. Therefore, an alternative approach should be formulated, which would allow us to recognise the significant or valuable aspects of these movements and their practices, without downplaying them as ‘unsuccessful’ or ‘failures’ altogether. Pierre Rosanvallon’s concept of ‘counter-democracy’ and Hardt and Negri’s perspective of a ‘Multitude’ will be evaluated as alternative approaches to current political movements. Although they are meritorious, both perspectives do not go far enough and need further articulation. The notion of ‘prefiguration’, originally derived from contemporary anarchist discourse, could be beneficial to this endeavour. After defining and deepening this concept from an anarchist perspective, it will be applied to one particular context: the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, during the 2011 revolution in Egypt. As will be concluded, in its application this concept of ‘prefiguration’ could teach us more about the recent wave of protest movements in general, and could help us to formulate a different approach to such movements