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'Prefigurative politics' has become a popular term for social movements' ethos of unity between means and ends, but its conceptual genealogy has escaped attention. This article disentangles two components: (a) an ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist tradition, which fights domination while directly constructing alternatives and (b) prefiguration as a recursive temporal framing, unknowingly drawn from Christianity, in which a future radiates backwards on its past. Tracing prefiguration from the Church Fathers to politicised resurfacings in the Diggers and the New Left, I associate it with Koselleck's 'process of reassurance' in a pre-ordained historical path. Contrasted to recursive prefiguration are the generative temporal framings couching defences of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. These emphasised the path dependency of revolutionary social transformation and the ethical underpinnings of anti-authoritarian politics. Misplaced recursive terminology, I argue, today conveniently distracts from the generative framing of means-ends unity, as the promise of revolution is replaced by that of environmental and industrial collapse. Instead of prefiguration, I suggest conceiving of means-ends unity in terms of Bloch's 'concrete utopia', and associating it with 'anxious' and 'catastrophic' forms of hope.

'Prefigurative politics' has become a popular term for social movements' ethos of unity between means and ends, but its conceptual genealogy has escaped attention. This article disentangles two components: an ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist tradition, which fights domination while directly constructing alternatives; and prefiguration as a recursive temporal framing, unknowingly drawn from Christianity, in which a future radiates backwards on its past. Tracing prefiguration from the Church Fathers to politicised re-surfacings in the Diggers and the New Left, I associate it with Koselleck's 'process of reassurance' in a pre-ordained historical path. Contrasted to recursive prefiguration are the generative temporal framings couching defences of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. These emphasised the path dependency of revolutionary social transformation and the ethical underpinnings of anti-authoritarian politics. Misplaced recursive terminology, I argue, today conveniently distracts from the generative framing of means-ends unity, as the promise of revolution is replaced by that of environmental and industrial collapse. Instead of prefiguration, I suggest conceiving of means-ends unity in terms of Bloch's 'concrete utopia', and associating it with 'anxious' and 'catastrophic' forms of hope.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Philosophies of Multiculturalism: Beyond Liberalism on 15 September 2016, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781848936065. ; Anarchism is strongly opposed to racism and bigotry, and celebrates cultural pluralism and the endless diversity of the human race. At the same time, anarchists are very critical of modern "multiculturalism" as a state-driven population and immigration management agenda. The chapter examines this critique, while offering an account of original anarchist approaches to identity and community conceived on an ethno-cultural basis. The anarchist critique of multiculturalism has several dimensions, including its continued reliance on the state, and its obviation of social antagonism in favour of competing demands for status and resources within existing arrangements of power. On this reading, multiculturalism dissolves the potential for solidarities that would challenge the given society by redefining which identities enjoy first-order relevance (namely, ethnic or religious ones) and allowing the state, and its technocratic machinations of coercive urban governance, to engage with groups (or their declared leaders) on that basis. In addition, anarchists have criticised multiculturalism as a privileged liberal ideology that pushed sections of the white working class population "left behind" by neoliberal globalisation into the hands of the far right. At the same time, anarchists celebrate the grassroots, quotidian, non-state-sanctioned forms of "multiculturalism" that people arguably practice on a daily basis – trying to get along with people from other backgrounds and avoiding cultural imposition. These have a long history in the Left, although under other names ("working class internationalism", "transnational solidarity", "cosmopolitanism" etc.). A fair amount of "classical" anarchist writing thus engaged with topics akin to multiculturalism, albeit in terms of "nations," "nationalities," or "peoples." The chapter surveys some of these, from Bakunin's writings on the rights of "nationalities" to exist and exercise their independence, through Kropotkin's discussions of national liberation, and on to Rocker's wide-ranging considerations on state-driven identity in Nationalism and Culture. Many anarchists wrote positively of non-Western cultures and their equality, especially Elisee Reclus, Peter Kropotkin and Jean Grave. These anarchist notions of cultural pluralism engage explicitly with class conflict in a way that contemporary liberal conceptions of multiculturalism do not. Finally, the chapter looks at anarchist responses to contemporary cultural pluralism. The chief argument here is that rather than seeking a blueprint for social relations among diverse groups in the absence of the state, anarchist theory should focus on present-tense questions relevant to its emergent strategic outlooks on social transformation, asking how encounters in mixed communities impact on political-cultural dynamics and how anarchists can use grassroots forms of encounter to push forward radical agendas. Here, the main issue remains the politics of solidarity across difference and asymmetric power. Dilemmas surrounding this issue are explored in two key contexts: settler-colonial societies and societies absorbing immigration.

From the squares of Spain to indigenous land in Canada, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Since 2011 they have gained prominence in recent waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with wide-ranging demands for social change. Through a series of international and interdisciplinary case studies from five continents, this topical collection is the first to focus on protest camps as unique organisational forms that transcend particular social movements' contexts. Whether erected in a park in Istanbul or a street in Mexico City, the significance of political encampments rests in their position as distinctive spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Written by a wide range of experts in the field the book offers a critical understanding of current protest events and will help better understanding of new global forms of democracy in action