Prefigurative Politics

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" At the core of Pollan’s argument is a call for the proliferation of local-food economies comprised of interconnected local institutions such as Community-Supported Agriculture programs,46 farmers’ markets, farm stores, community-scaled slaughterhouses and processing facilities, small shops, farm-to-restaurant programs, and metropolitan buying clubs. These institutions, he notes, have long worked hand-in-glove with another set of institutions—the Rodale Institute, the Land Institute, and, it might be added, the New Alchemy Institute—that have served as an alternative network for research and development aimed at working out the scientific and technological details of a locally scaled and environmentally sustainable food system.

This sort of institution-building effort is best understood as a manifestation of “prefigurative politics,” not anti-politics. Those who view Pollan as apolitical tend to assume that the only form of politics worthy of the name is “instrumental politics”: the direct confrontation of the powers that be, such as fighting in the streets, courts, and the halls of Congress to loosen the corporate stranglehold on regulatory agencies. In contrast, advocates of prefigurative politics seek to create a new culture within the shell of the old, typically by building a set of alternative institutions. In doing so, they aim to prefigure the world in which they would like to live. This countercultural strategy is precisely what animated the original organic movement of the 1960s, whose eclipse by “Big Organic” Pollan laments. While it is certainly legitimate to question whether a prefigurative strategy for social change can provide an effective or sufficient means to address the environmental and social ills generated by our globalized industrial food system, it is a mistake to think of such a strategy as apolitical. As a coordinated, if indirect, effort to alter an existing set of social and economic relations, it is political by definition. (http://etc.technologyandculture.net/2009/07/19/local-food-and-the-problem-of-public-authority/)

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Note on prefigurative politics [1]:

“The concept of prefigurative politics is borrowed from Doug Rossinow, who discovered it in Winifred Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: The Great Refusal, 1962–1968 (South Hadley, Mass., 1982). On the New Left’s prefigurative politics and the distinction between prefigurative and instrumental politics in general, see Breines, 6–7, 30, 47–50; Rossinow, “The New Left in the Counterculture: Hypotheses and Evidence,” Radical History Review 67 (1997): 85; Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York, 1998), 248, 422n; and John Case and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, eds., Co-ops, Communes and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s (New York, 1979), 4.