3 - From the Assembly to Council Democracy: Towards a Prefigurative Form of Government?

Summary

Against the anarchist reading of prefiguration as a process of ‘building a new society in the shell of the old’, prefigurative democracy may also be understood as an attempt to challenge and reshape society’s political form. This gives rise to the question whether prefigurative democracy also implies a particular, substantive idea of what such a political form should look like. Is prefiguration merely a formal concept, which could be applied in the context of any social movement, irrespective of their concrete political aspirations (Raekstad and Gradin 2020: 36)? Or is it also underpinned by a distinctively prefigurative view of democratic organisation or government? To speak with Claude Lefort, does prefigurative democracy imply a particular mise en forme, mise en sens and mise en scène?

There is also another reason to raise this question at this point. In the previous chapter I interpreted prefiguration as a politics without ends. I argued that its practitioners are not primarily concerned with the question how, or when, their practices will eventually come to a close. This also means that prefigurative movements often seek their own continuation: they typically try to prolong and expand their own practices as long as possible. But, as political theorists have argued in the wake of recent occupy movements, if prefigurative democracy is to sustain over time it will need to acquire a more durable organisational form and structure (Hardt and Negri 2017: 224). This leads to a certain tension. For how can a democratic politics that is characterised by its open-endedness and spontaneity, its experimental and experiential character, and its immediate experience of freedom be formalised without compromising on precisely these aspects? Might any attempt to institutionalise prefigurative democracy not also entail the loss of precisely these distinctive features?

What might a more durable institutional form for prefigurative democracy look like? In order to answer this question we may first need to ask what kind of institutions, policies and procedures can already be seen to be taking shape within the practices and structures of contemporary prefigurative movements. One form of organisation that has been widely employed by many recent movements is the public assembly. A number of key features have been be attributed to the assembly form. The assembly is a public encounter between people with different experiences and perspectives. But precisely by virtue of this, it challenges established hierarchical relations and forms of leadership.