In my experience it is the total opposite: the habit of individual, culturally-oriented actions cultivates a normalization of symbolic, small-scale actions and prevents people to develop a taster for collective action. Once they hit the limit of what they can do alone in the cultural sphere, instead of asking themselves how to overcome these limits, they just ignore collective forms of action to keep repeating the same individualistic and symbolic actions. Most people who show up and take initiative in collective efforts almost always have no history of engaging with symbolic actions and emancipating themselves from that mindset. There are a few, but it’s by far the exception.

I’m one of them. I went from thinking naively that consumer politics matter to leaving my career to fight big tech, unionize tech workers, and for a year or so I’ve also worked on limiting the harm of generative AI specifically.

If I thought this petty stuff would do anything, I would have probably wasted a lot of time in the wrong hole.

Performative politics have been proven to have a paralyzing effect on people. If you feel you’re doing something and it has no impact, you just disengage from meaningful politics because you already absolved yourself.

The AI sector is not pushed by consumer money. A consumer strike won’t alter at all the macro-dynamics happening at the moment. If you want to resist AI, go blow up some data center or unionize some tech workers.

You’re making a moralistic point, blaming consumers instead of corporations, which leaves not much room for action.

I understood your message very clearly. It’s sad to work for most companies. It’s the default and it’s completely preposterous to suggest they want to work for TikTok specifically. It’s what was available to them. Pitying striking workers makes no sense. There’s nothing to look deeper into.

they want severance pay. Don’t shame workers for trying to make a living, you scab

Your analysis is correct and I agree with the frame. My point is that there’s no single point of resolution: creating unstable dependencies is inevitable, it is necessary because we are rooted in an existing system that controls most of the resources. The resources provided by the unstable dependency must be used to make yourself eventually independent and remove the unstable dependency, making the system or the single organization able to reproduce itself without the unstable dependency. If your proposal doesn’t have a path to achieve reproduction and sustainability that is realistic given the resources available, it’s prefigurative, in the sense that it doesn’t create lasting change beyond the people that lived through that experience. People who will probably be burned out and in conflict with each other, but that’s a different problem.

The double system theory anyway is a description of how system changes all the time, but won’t tell you which projects are viable. That’s part of strategy development and can be answered only subjectively and partially: the information necessary to develop such projects is never in a single place and cannot be accessed through armchair reasoning or debate. It is not an act of developing a blueprint but more like navigating. A lot of prefigurative efforts are very focused on the destination but forgot to bring the sail and a few planks to fix holes in the boat. “We are prefiguring the day in which we will reach our destination port”, while the boat is filling with water.

It is similar indeed. Dual power is a specific political implementation of the more general concept

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.

So, “reforming” is quite a loaded term so I wouldn’t use it to avoid confusion. One way to explain this is “double system theory”, namely the idea that a successful transition between two systems (any kind of system, not just social or political systems) happens only if the dismantling of the old happens in sync with the growth of the new and this growth can fulfill the needs of its participants better than the old. Anything else will eventually fail.

If you build a new system without fueling it with the resources that go to the old, you will be a cathedral in the desert that will eventually be abandoned to return to the old system. A lot of utopian communes and prefigurative politics might fall into this category. Also the idea of building socialism in a single state (the new) without dismantling global power structures that will eventually coup your country.

If you dismantle the old without building the new and therefore fulfilling the needs the old was fulfilling, you will encounter a lot of resistance. These are the forces of reaction during revolutionary struggles, for example, where revolutionary states end up compromising a lot to appease the needs of the population, or get toppled by entrenched interests.

How do you see everyday people participating in this political movement - voting? canvassing? running for office?

Everything goes. Politics must be played with the full deck of cards. Find the points of leverage, understand what’s the best form to apply such leverage and go for it. Sometimes voting, sometimes armed struggle, sometimes structure-based organizing. This is a subjective decision that must be done from the inside: this implies that I can speak for my own strategy and the strategy of my orgs, but I must suspend judgement on the strategy of others. No outside means also “no outside of my experience”.

I guess you see Mamdani as such an example? Tho I doubt anarchists would reject him just on the grounds of him being a reformist and therefore not valuable to the cause, in my experience any push towards a more socialist society is generally embraced and not rejected no matter where it comes from.

There are for sure a lot of novel elements in Mamdani and in what NYC-DSA is doing, even though they are still a very old-fashioned organization in many regards:

• full embrace of structure-based organizing, which is not new as a practice, but its resurgence often frames this as the primary source of power.
• pragmatic communication
• hostility to purism and sectarianism
• general disengagement with leftist infighting, including their own internal conflict with the national. They go their own way, they use their points of leverage, they lead by example.

You you have an example of such theory? To me that smells like something Marxists would falsely claim to discredit the idea.

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.

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.

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.

This is a very different way to use the term than how it is used in Europe and in the theory I read. For me prefigurative politics are raves (in the European sense), TAZ, worldbuilding workshops, etc etc.

A tool library, even if only small, is prefiguration for example.

For me, if it’s done to make feel better the people setting it up, it is prefigurative. If it’s done to solve real problems for real people who don’t read theory, it’s not prefigurative. You’re already doing the thing, so there’s nothing to prefigurate. If you believe that by doing it, a thousand other tool libraries will bloom, that’s prefigurative again, because that’s assuming that the current state of things is due to a lack of imagination and liberating subjective experiences, which didn’t bring much so far. We have had at least 30-40 years of this, and most spaces and people who participated in such activities are still as powerless as they were in the past.

Doing politics without trying to create an arbitrary, imagined boundary between a system and its outside, the old and the new, the inside and the outside. Doing politics within history, resisting the urge to put yourself outside of it. No escapism, no coping, no otherworlding. Regaining agency by rooting yourself where you are and altering the system you’re in to bring about a new system.

Well, it hasn’t been working so far. The last 30 years of conscious prefigurative politics didn’t achieve much.

Prefiguration is often understood as purely performative. “Behaving as if”. For example, in Temporary Autonomous Zones that do not challenge existent power nor deal with the conflict coming from outside the prefigurative bubble.

“Building the new in the shell of the old” is just… change? It’s the normal mutation of society. System shift, paradigm shift, etc etc.

it’s your life, you decide. You can also decide not to give it meaning.

Here I see a lot of people who have been served badly prepared game. For any meat that tastes too gamey, if you’re not sure how to prepare it, there are some tricks that work pretty much everytime:

1. Make an infusion of ginger by boiling it for half an hour. Lot of ginger, the water must taste spicy. Then soak the meat in it overnight. It won’t really live a gingery taste in the meat, so it’s good for most preparations.
2. Don’t roast, but braise. Red wine, juniper berries, rosemary, cloves, bayleaves, and laurel are good with most wild animals and musky meats: deer, wild boar, mutton, rock goat, etc etc. Sheepmeat and goatmeat can also go with a lot of cumin, turmeric, chili, cinnamon and cardamom, if you want a more central Asian vibe.

Broke my elbow twice: one time at like 7 sliding down a hill and one time at like 13 doing a overhead kick playing soccer. Slit the skin of my head open at 8 after being pushed by a classmate against the base of a decorated column. Lot of blood, many stitches.

I would argue the title implies “leaving the tech industry”, and in the beginning it says the article is for who wants to still work with the same skillset, but outside of the tech industry as in the companies who produce technology for profit. Probably only the tech co-op part can be said to be still within the tech industry

Futurism.com is garbage. I think it’s quite a distorted narrative: the vetting is extremely invasive, with regular face scans and passport verifications at sign up. Then maybe a lot of shit was still going through, but this narrative suggests that these companies are not at the forefront of extremely invasive worker surveillance, which is demonstrably false given the wave of class actions and privacy violation proceedings they are subject to.