remembers the shape of¶

"Prefiguration," in the sense anarchists tend to use it, amounts to little more than wishful thinking -- a sort of homeopathic potentiation, in which society "remembers the shape of" molecules dissolved in it. The hope is to act as model citizens of a world that doesn't exist. https://t.co/s66lcdWLwE To a Marxist, however, every action is an investigation. Today's revolutionary formations are laboratories, crucibles of experimentation. The results of those experiments guide how we proceed in the future. For this to work, we have to approach with the framing of falsifiability. We set out with the best ideas we have, based on careful study of the history of both revolution in general and our particular social context. We design our projects in such a way that will give us useful data, and we make ourselves quick to integrate that data into our practice. Not everything needs to be designed from scratch: we have plenty of history to draw on. But a refusal to approach this scientifically leads to orgs getting defanged, outmaneuvered, exhausted, and defeated, all in the name of preserving the "prefiguration" of a prophesied utopia. In the end, we never truly know what exactly we're trying to prefigure. We may know what we would like to happen, eventually, but the configuration of each step along the way must adapt to fit the previous ones. The form changes as conditions shift around us. If we're effective, those changing circumstances will largely reflect what we will have done. But no plan survives contact with the enemy. Our goal is not for the plan, but for the movement to advance, at every stage of its development.