Project or Program? Prefigurative Politics, Folk Politics and the Struggle for Change

Recent political campaigns within the mainstream and social democratic left have been billed (both by themselves and others) as 'revolutionary'.From Podemos to Bernie Sanders' so-called 'political revolution,' grassroots movements have mobilised the imagery and rhetoric of collective liberation, bottom-up decision-making, and opposition to the status quo.This political development, which evokes a certain reform-versus-revolution synthesis, stands in stark contrast to the operational logics - namely those of refusal, flight, and experimentation with new forms of social organisation - of autonomous and prefigurative anti-capitalist (or at least counter-neoliberal) social movements of the last two decades, from Quebec's Maple Spring to Occupy Wall Street and beyond.In this essay, I will attempt to tease out some of the tensions as well as commonalities between these prefigurative projects, and the coordinated policy and cultural programs proposed by proponents of less horizontal forms of political organising.The first stage of this inquiry will probe the anti-power, anti-hegemonic principles that guide much of the discourse that characterises these modes of political intervention and social production.This is followed by a discussion of the limits, especially in terms of reach and mass, that are thought to undermine these prefigurative strategies.Finally, these limits will be weighed against recent calls for organised programs of political plurality based on coordinated efforts at both the cultural and policy level.Before starting down this line of inquiry, however, I would like to introduce two terms that I will utilise throughout this paper to designate each of these political streams: project and program.The term project, in this instance, is intended to encapsulate the experimental, self-generated character of many movements of autonomy.It is intended to emphasise their common underlying goal of the active creation of alternatives.By contrast, the term program is used throughout in relation to coordinated efforts to bring these political projects into closer connection with pre-existing policy and cultural goals.The political program, in this sense, is a compound movement of social production and political organisation that reaches beyond strategies of refusal and attempts to intervene at many points throughout the socio-political landscape, whereas the project stands out as the generation and rearticulation of alternatives in practice.It will be my goal in the pages that follow to clarify this contrast while simultaneously finding points of agreement and harmony that assist in promoting negotiation and coordination between these two strategic positions.To begin, let's consider some of the underlying principles and characteristics of the prefigurative project.First, the prefigurative experiments of the past two decades - the global justice mobilisations of the late 1990s, the 2010 UK tuition protests, Occupy Wall Street, Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution, or more recently, the 2017 campus occupations and student strikes in Puerto Rico - were highly participatory mobilisations from below, often coordinated outside of bureaucratic structures, and generally including some alternative or open form of outreach and narrative framing

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