Is there a connection between prefiguration and vanguardism?
*Reading Vanguard Stacks: Self-Governing against Digital Colonialism make me think about this.
They both involve some kind of revolutionary acts in advance of the actual full revolution, right. Vanguardism is your Marxist approach, Prefiguration your more anarchist approach.
From a bit of reading around, there is certainly a connection. It is mostly proclamations of prefiguration as a better alternative to vanguardism.
The counterpart of the vanguard party is the catalyst group.
I think that vanguardism is more about having some professional group of revolutionaries who lead the charge. And Prefiguration is more about living the way now that you want to see the future be.
The politics of prefiguration rejected the centrism and vanguardism of many of the groups and political parties of the 1960s.
1. One view
Clearly biased towards prefiguration, seeing vanguardism as authoritarian.
This sort of organizing council, composed of ideological anarchists and libertarian socialists that has the goal of spurring on further radicalization and prefiguration, is called a catalyst group. It stands in contrast to the vanguard model of the authoritarians.
And if such a group does not view itself as accountable to and consisting of the community it is embedded in, it will often have a tendency to become a sort of violent vanguard party, conscripting the masses into an insurrection under their hierarchical control.
2. Another view
Also biased towards prefiguration and against vanguardism it would seem.
In the times depleted of futurity in which we live, the role of prefigurative practices stands to become a vital ingredient to any ambitious political project that wants to stay clear of vanguardism.
– https://mycourses.aalto.fi/pluginfile.php/565674/mod_resource/content/1/Prefigurative_Practices.pdf
3. Elsewhere
3.1. In my garden
Notes that link to this note (AKA backlinks).