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đŸȘ” The Threshold

SDS's defining innovation was building movement structures that prefigured the desired society

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tagsja-picks, define, definitional_content, trade, singleton, xref, category/definitional-content
aliases@bevins_if_2023, loc. 82

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SDS’s defining innovation was building movement structures that prefigured the desired society

Evidence

By the 1960s, SDS believed that the official Marxist-Leninist system of the Soviet Union had congealed into an undemocratic, centralized bureaucracy. The revolutionary means had become its ends. In the USSR, the hierarchical vanguard Party was now the state. SDS’s approach—perhaps the thing that was truly “new” about the New Left—dictated that they should adopt organizational forms now that they would like to see in the world they wanted to create. The name given to this was “prefigurative politics”—what you are doing now will prefigure, or show a glimpse of, the world you want to live in tomorrow. Even ardent defenders of SDS recognized that this created a fundamental tension between organizational forms and the goals of political change. This meant experimenting with anti-hierarchical structures, and it opened them up to criticism that they didn’t really care about their demands. Eloquent supporters of this approach admitted that this was somewhat true, that means were important, as well as the ends. But, they said, they refused to corrupt their movement, which was also about building community, for instrumental purposes. Looking back after the New Left failed in achieving most of its stated goals, sociologist Wini Breines wrote, “It is my conviction that the attempt to seek the ‘salvation of the soul’ in politics, to forge a new definition of politics in which violence, authority, and hierarchy did not reign supreme is the most unique and powerful legacy of the new left.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 82

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Defines ‘prefigurative politics’ concretely through the SDS case.
  • XREF: connects to: Early SDS grew through face-to-face organizing, not media strategy — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and
, 72; The SDS adopted a permanent-mobilization strategy ending in worker-supported revolution; Prefigurative politics holds that movement structure should mirror desired society — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and
, 82 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

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