The path is the goal: Utopia as process

As part of a renewed interest in prefigurative politics evident in contemporary
activism, important critical work is being undertaken that focuses on the
temporal structure of such prefigurative action. The central problem this
article therefore takes as its starting point is the nature of our current political
utopias – that they are transcendent rather than grounded, or put another
way – rather than here-and-now they are nowhere – in an ever-receding
future/past, or otherwise in an alternate reality altogether. They are
impossible. The paper will argue that if we are to move beyond our current
states of bewilderment, disorientation and denial, we will need to establish
new (and learn from existing) grounded utopias which rather than being not-
now and nowhere, are co-imagined and lived right here and right now.
Drawing on classical and contemporary anarchist theory, and from a recent
collective visioning project involving a global cross-section of anti-capitalist,
ecological, feminist and anti-racist activists, the anarchist concept of
permanent revolution will be examined as a way to confront such concerns.
The temporal gap between current struggles and imagined futures will be
problematised, prefigurative praxes critiqued, and a politics of immanence
explored in remedy.