Forthcoming as

Dinerstein, A.C. (2021) ‘Prefiguration and The Principle of Hope’. In Monticelli, L. (Ed.) PREFIGURATION. A
SHORT INTRODUCTION, Policy Press, Bristol

The concept of ‘prefiguration’ and E. Bloch’s philosophy of hope

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

If it remains strong enough… possesses itself undivertedly enough, it will not go to ruin – hope will not let us to
ruin. For the human soul embraces everything, including the other side which is not yet. -E. Bloch, Spirit of
Utopia, 1918: 276.

We live the future of a past that is not our own. -Indigenous Action, 2020

Introduction

Despite hope and prefiguration naturally belonging together, hope is rarely mentioned in
the theory or practice of prefiguration. One plausible explanation for this lack of interest
in the concept of hope could be that the latter is kept within philosophical, ethical and
religious domains of knowledge. Recognised perhaps as a motivating notion, hope does
not seem to befit radical activists’ prefigurative politics that aim to enact in the present
the change that wants to be seen in the future (Maeckelbergh, 2011). The expression
‘prefiguration’ has a long trajectory, which takes us back to the struggles of ‘nineteenth
century anarchists and includes the syndicalists, council communists and the New Left’
(Boggs, 1977: 100). Boggs’ Marxist take on prefiguration relates to radical socialist
politics, i.e. ‘the embodiment within the ongoing political practice of the movement, of
those forms of social relations, decision making, culture, and human experience that are
the ultimate goal’ (Boggs, 1977: 100). This includes the creation of new institutions,
relations and organisations (or mediations) or ‘counter-institutions’ (Murray, 2015) in
both the production and the social reproduction domains of social life aiming at
fostering revolutionary change. With the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street
movement, the term prefigurative politics lost its revolutionary edge and became limited
to the radicalisation of movements’ organisational processes among radical activists,
who follow Graeber’s reflections on these movements (Murray, 2015). Against this,
Raekstad (2017: 364) defends the substantial role of prefigurative politics for any
revolutionary practice, beyond the radical democratisation of movements’ practice.
Prefigurative politics is both a struggle against the state and capitalism, but also an
experiment to bring about the new society (Raekstad, 2017: 364), while the separation
between both dimensions, i.e. strategic and prefigurative, i.e. confronting and contesting
power and reinventing the world respectively are a ‘false dichotomy’ (Maeckelbergh,
2016: 121).
The debate about prefiguration is vast and this book addresses many of the
significant issues around it. In my previous work, I immersed myself into Ernst Bloch’s
revolutionary philosophy, and put autonomous struggles by Latin American movements
in the key of hope, naming prefiguration as the art of organising hope (Dinerstein,
2015). In this chapter, I want to enquire and explore what are the material and
philosophical groundings that Bloch’s process philosophy offers to a theory and practice
of prefiguration. I postulate that Bloch’s ontology of the Not-Yet-Being, by which both
humans and the world are seen to be in a process of becoming, is essential to an
understanding of prefiguration. This not only authorises a deeper understanding of
prefiguration, but also facilitates its decolonisation into ‘pluriversal’ prefigurative
politics. When enacted as struggle hope transforms prefiguration into an all-
encompassing revolutionary praxis towards what Bloch has called home (Heimat), the
content of which is pluriversal, rather than universal.

On Hope

Before discussing the benefits of connecting prefiguration and hope, it is important to

address and move away from the controversy over the meaning of hope, between those
who perceive hope as an emotion that must be cultivated to believe that another world is
possible, and those who argue that hope is damaging to movements’ intention to change
the world. These elucidations correspond to stagnant interpretations of hope from Greek
mythology. In Hesiod’s Works and Days, we are told that Zeus sends Pandora – the first
mortal woman – to Earth. With her, she brings a jar full of gifts (or vices), and when
Pandora opens the jar these escape and disperse into the world – except Elpis, hope
(Dinerstein, 2016a).
Why did hope remain in the jar? In the Christian tradition hope remained in
Pandora’s jar because it was Zeus’ gift to humanity. Christian hope does not have a
utopian function; its function is to denote a reality perceived but not yet realised, which
although already instated by Christ will not be fulfilled in this world (Dinerstein and

2
Deneulin, 2012: 596). Hope is future salvation and exists politically as wishful thinking
and expectation.
Nietzsche’s alternative interpretation of the myth is even more paralysing: hope
persisted in the jar because Zeus wanted to punish humanity with ‘the greatest of evils
for it lengthens the ordeal of man’ (Nietzsche, 1908: 102). We hope, we keep going, we
suffer, we change nothing. In this light, Žižek argues that ‘the dream of an alternative is a
sign of theoretical cowardice, functioning as a fetish that prevents us from thinking
through to the end the deadlock of our predicament.’ (Žižek, 2018: 19)
But both hope as gift and hope as evil share the same feature: they wrongly
maintain that hope is wishful, a wish for a postponed salvation, an inspirational wish, a
wish that keeps us going. I turn now to Bloch’s materialist philosophy to suggest that
hope is neither a passive expectation nor a paralysing ideological discourse, but a human
force driving the exploration, within the historical conditions and context given, into the
new and its realisation: hope is not wishful but wilful (Levitas, 1997).

Bloch’s process philosophy

In a context marked by profound disappointment with German politics at the beginning

of the twentieth century – world wars, the Holocaust – Ernst Bloch articulated a
meaning for ‘hope’ outside of both the religious and ideological domains into a new
philosophy of praxis (Bloch, 1959/1986). In The Principle of Hope (1986/1959) and
previous works, Bloch reflects on the human impulse to endeavour outwards, beyond,
onto an active process of discovering the content of the world, which is not
predetermined but, rather, is ‘undecided material’ (Bloch, 1959/1985: 199). This human
determination is anthropological:a genuine feature of what makes us human (Levy,
1997: 181). Hope is then a basic element of human praxis.
Bloch’s process philosophy is an antidote to the understanding of reality as
closed. Therefore, it is a necessary tool that permits us to rethink prefiguration as
‘philosophically-grounded’ (Hudis, 2005). For Bloch, ‘philosophy has consciously to bear
the responsibility of prefiguration, and the prefiguration at that of an objectively real
appearance, of the world of process, of the real world of hope itself… To perceive this
genesis is the function of philosophy (Bloch, 1971: 4).
The possibility of articulating other forms of social, economic, political,
mediations obliges us to regard the present as unfinished and in movement. ‘Objective’

3
reality is always a temporary solidification of an ongoing struggle over the establishment
of objectivity. The first step in the process of prefiguration is to challenge the given
reality as the objective reality. Bloch proposes a different concept of reality ‘to that of
positivism to which the idea of process is alien,’ pointing out that ‘Sometimes the
ossified concept of reality even penetrated Marxism and consequently made it schematic’
(Bloch, 1959/1986: 196). A non-ossified concept of reality makes the struggle over the
establishment of an objective reality transparent. It aids the visualisation of other
possible not yet realities that are lurking underneath the surface of the objective reality
of capital. Prefiguration is then about discovering, recognising and giving shape to these
alternative realities, the content of which is still undecided.

Reality is utopian: From the ontology of Being to the ontology of Becoming

Bloch grounds the necessity to venture beyond the given reality, and the possibility to
prefigure alternatives on a metaphysical, philosophical and political dispositive by which
reality is conceived of as utopian. But, in what ways is reality utopian? ‘Reality is
utopian in the sense of being literally not (yet) “there” in a finished form’ (Moir, 2018a:
205). The existence of the Not-Yet defines the real character of reality: reality is not real
if it does not contain the Not-Yet within it: ‘there is no true realism without the true
dimension of the openness’ of the world. (Bloch, 1959/1986: 237–238). The implications
of the utopian character of reality is that prefiguration does not depend on activists’
strategic radical commitment with radical change only, but in their capacity to engage
with a Not-Yet reality, the possibility that already exists in the present. Bloch’s
materialist philosophy presents to us an open system where the ungraspable category of
the Not-Yet is central to human action. To change the world is a necessity because both
humans and humanity are unfinished, and ‘human beings, as matter become-conscious,
are capable of realising it.’ (Moir, 2018b: 2). With this, Bloch contests Heidegger’s
‘ontology of Being’ and proposes instead an ontology of the Not-Yet Being or Becoming.
Hope is central to this ontology of Becoming (Gross, 1972: 123) and it is also crucial for
prefiguration. We must not think of ourselves as human beings who decide to change the
world. We must think of ourselves as Not-Yet there as humans and the world is not there
yet too.

4
Educated hope: From abstract to concrete utopia

If the content of the Not-Yet reality is undecided, there is scope to venture beyond the
given. But this does not mean merely visualising abstractions but rather, grasping the
new as something in motion, in process. Undecided material cannot be realised through
abstract ideals ‘but rather the repressed elements of the new, humanised society, that is
a concrete ideal, are set free’ (Bloch 1959/1986: 199). Ours is not a time for abstract
utopias that imagine the future, that promise a better world with no correlation to the
historical and material developments of our time. To only imagine a better society is a
weakness: ‘The weak kind’, writes Bloch, ‘merely dreams, stays within itself. The brave
acts, its strength goes outwards’ (Bloch, 1959/1986: 1034).
Bloch distinguishes between abstract and concrete utopia to point us in the
direction of the correct concept of utopia (Levitas 2008), i.e. ‘concrete utopia’
(Dinerstein 2015), which is one that can mobilise the utopian content of reality. Bloch
suggests that it is the education of hope facilitates the movement from abstract to
‘concrete utopia’ which is the same as ‘moving from wishful thinking to wilful and
instrumental action’ (Levitas, 2008: 43).
Educated hope rejects abstract utopias for they are not ‘mediated with the existing
social tendency and possibility’ (Bloch, 1970/2010: 89-90) and are easily dismissed as
‘abstract dreams’. Rather than building castles in the air like abstract utopia does,
concrete utopia is ‘inextricably connected to a material understanding of the world’
(Moir, 2018b). Bloch’s concrete utopia operates within the space that is Not-Yet, with no
expectations or having decided a priori the principles that would guide it; concrete
utopias are steps in the process of prefiguring a society ‘other’. Educated hope ‘entails
winnowing out the abstract elements that accrue around the concrete (transformative)
core.’ (Levitas, 2008: 44). Bloch writes:

‘As long as the reality has not become a completely determined one, as long as it possesses
still unclosed possibilities, in the shape of new shoots and new spaces of development, then
no absolute objection to utopia can be raised by merely factual reality. Objections to bad
utopias can be raised, i.e. to abstractly extravagant, badly mediated ones, but precisely
concrete utopia has in process-reality a corresponding element; that of the mediated
Novum.’ (Bloch 1959/1986: 197)

5
Educated hope has a second and important function for prefiguration: it facilitates the
encounter between subjective hope and objective hope through prefigurative action.
Subjective hope, highlights Geoghegan, ‘involves a perpetual and ubiquitous
representation of that which is deemed to be absent’ (Geoghegan 1996: 34). Objective
hope is the ‘concrete possibility generated by each successive age, which enable
subjective hope actively to develop the world. Together they constitute the “subjective
and objective hope-contents of the world”’ (Geoghegan, 1996: 34).
But hope is surrounded by danger, it is vulnerable and it is exposed to disappointment
due to the contradictory dynamics of the prefigurative struggle which is mediated by the
capitalist state, the law, money, colonial and patriarchal power and so on:

Hope is not confidence. If it could not be disappointable, it would not be hope. That is part
of it. Otherwise, it would be cast in a picture. It would let itself be bargained down. It would
capitulate and say, that is what I had hoped for. Thus, hope is critical and can be
disappointed ... Hope is surrounded by dangers, and it is the consciousness of danger and
at the same time the determined negation of that which continually makes the opposite of
the hoped-for object possible. (Bloch, 1988: 16–17)

Yet, the prefigurative work with the Not-Yet always creates an excess, that is a surplus
utopia that is unnamed, boundless, and walks in the direction of the Novum.

Bloch’s ‘warm current’ of Marxism and the revolutionary transformation of

the world

Bloch became a Marxist relatively late in his career but he was deeply influenced by him.
Like Marx, Bloch regarded himself as a humanist because for him, as well as for Marx,
class struggle is ultimately struggle against dehumanisation: ‘Marxism in general is
absolutely nothing but the struggle against the dehumanisation which culminates in
capitalism until it is completely cancelled’ (Bloch, 1959/1986: 1358). By rejecting Hegel’s
‘positive humanism’ and, against it, Marx calls himself a ‘humanist’ who ‘denies that
nature can be completely subsumed by human subjective activity, which is ‘an extension
and part of nature’ (Hudis, 2012: 90). Bloch identifies with this call and sees Marxism as
the force behind both the ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of
things...[t]he conditions of [which] result from the premises now in existence’ (Marx,

6
1845/1846/ 2000) on the one hand, and as the movement ‘towards socialism and
humanization of nature’ (Boldyrev, 2015: 33), on the other hand: ‘Marx’s critique
displays …all the more sharply the recesses, fissures, cracks, and contrast incorporated
in the objectively existing economy’ (Bloch, 1959/1986: 620). The future, which is
deliberately missing in Marx’s work, is present in his writings ‘as a knowing future
capable of being shaped’ (Bloch 1959/1986: 621). This shaping process is aided by hope,
the affect of the anticipation of new possibilities. (Boldyrev, 2015: 33). Bloch’s
philosophy presents hope as a force that ‘focuses on progressive self-consciousness and
revolutionary social practice’ (Boldyrev, 2015: 34). Hope is the driving force behind the
revolutionary transformation of the world, which as Boldyrev (2015) suggests, could not
occur without hope.
The revolutionary transformation of the world is not completely contingent but
requires that ‘fronts of political possibility’ (Amsler, 2016) are open through struggle.
Bloch uses the term ‘world without Front’ to explain a mode of being where ‘there is no
space of or location from which to enunciate or engage in responses to “badly existing”
realities in order to alter them because these realities do not include … “open
dimensions” in people or things’ (Bloch cited by Amsler 2016: 26). Bloch’s ontology of
Not-Yet-Being opens onto a world ‘with Front’. Clearly, the Front ‘is not a physical
location (Amsler 2016: 26): it is where (and when) ‘the Unbecome is located and seeks to
articulate itself’ (Bloch 1995: 199 cited by Amsler 2016: 26).
Bloch makes a substantial distinction between what he calls the ‘cold’ and the
‘warm’ streams of Marxism, i.e. economic analysis and anticipatory prospective that
involves psychological, subjective and cultural elements, respectively, and ‘emphasises
the integral character of Marx’s epistemology, for which the ability to understand the
world was not wholly independent of the will to change it’ (Hudson, 1982: 61). He
suggests that ‘only coldness and warmth of concrete anticipation together therefore
ensure that neither the path in itself nor the goal in itself are held apart from one
another undialectically and so become reified and isolated’ (Bloch, 1959/1986: 209).
Bloch brings the prefigurative element of Marx’s work, i.e. ‘a prefigurative critique of
political economy’ (Dinerstein 2016b) to the forefront, rescuing Marx from vulgar
economism and linear conceptualisations of revolutionary political development. By
situating himself in the warm stream he adds another dimension to Marx’s
understanding of the revolutionary subject. While Marx speaks of man’s consciousness
about the possibility to change society, Bloch complements this with the notion of

7
‘hoping’, by positing that ‘man was an intention pointing ahead…in the process of
becoming what [her] is’ (Gross, 1972: 199). This means that the not-yet-conscious
‘desires of human being correspond to the not-yet-realized utopian contents of the world
process itself’ (Moir, 2018a: 207).

From pre-history to Home

Bloch announced that ‘man everywhere is still living in prehistory … the true genesis is
not at the beginning, but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and
existence become radical: that is, comprehend their own roots’ (Bloch, 1971: 44). To him,
like for Marx, the root of history is the working of people transforming the given
circumstances of the world. His dialectical analysis of time which prevents us from
conceiving of prefiguration as some linear process: Bloch displays ‘an analysis of the past
which illuminates the present and can direct us to a better future [so that] unrealised
potentialities are latent in the present, and the signs of foreshadowing that indicate the
tendency of the direction and movements of the present into the future’ (Kellner, 1997:
81).
Bloch suggests that ‘only the horizon of the future…gives reality its dimension of
reality’ (Bloch, 1971: 103), but he distinguishes between a good or ‘authentic’ future and
a bad or ‘unauthentic’ future (Bloch, 2017: 61). The latter is a future that does not bring
anything new but repeats what it has been done many times before. It is a future that
does not know the path but has already decided the point of arrival (abstracted from the
material reality of the world). Instead, the authentic future ‘contains the Novum towards
which there exists a tendency, a possibility…’ (Bloch 2017: 61, my translation). Both the
path and the point of arrival are uncertain. Bloch offers the term ‘Heimat
(home/homeland), to signify the Novum. We can feel (corazonar) the meaning of
Heimat although we cannnot describe it accurately. Bloch says that it is a place where
life comes to fully realise itself:

‘Once we have all understood humanity itself and ‘established [our] domain in real
democracy, without depersonalization and alienation, something arises in the world which
all [people] have glimpsed in childhood: a place and a state in which no one has yet been.
And the name of this something is home or homeland’ (Bloch, 1971: 44-45; also 1959/1995:
1376).

8
Decolonising prefiguration: Corazonar and the Pluriverse

If hope designates prefigurative collective struggles, it should not be trapped in the

Eurocentric epistemological cage that encapsulates prefiguration within the
modern/colonial epistemological setting. Prefiguration scholars and activists are still
lacking a deep reflection on the persistence of Eurocentric views and practices of
prefiguration that neglect, ignore, or subsume non-Western and indigenous
prefigurative struggles so that they reproduce the coloniality of power, knowledge and
gender (Quijano, 2008; Lugones, 2018), that movements are struggling against. Post-
coloniality is not the same as the end of coloniality. The latter has been re-articulated on
new bases (Quijano, 2008: 214).
The theory and reality of prefiguration must be decolonised. Prefiguration means
different things to indigenous and non-indigenous collectives. While for non-indigenous
people, the idea of prefiguration is connected to ‘emancipation’, for indigenous people,
prefiguration is inevitably a decolonising project. But decolonising prefiguration is not
about ‘recognition of difference’; it means to address questions about which practices are
deemed to be prefigurative, and by whom, and what are the limits of present
conceptualisations of prefiguration. As a praxis-oriented concept, hope detonates
Eurocentric conceptualisations of prefiguration that do not belong to the experience of
insurgency against coloniality of power, knowledge and gender by the present ‘epistemic
struggles’ that are challenging ‘dominant ways of thinking and ordering of the real’ as
well as the forms in which we understand them’ (Icaza and Vázquez 2013: 683).
Eurocentric approaches and practices of prefiguration are preventing us from
grasping the prefigurative elements of indigenous and other movements’ struggles
against the power of dispossession and expropriation, against neo-colonial extractivism,
and in what alternative ways are these ‘prefigurative’. The case of the Zapatista
movement (Chiapas, Mexico) is telling. In their First Declaration, they rejected the ‘lie
about the defeat of hope’ and call for ‘the international of hope’ (SIM, 1996). Hope here
belongs with the Mayan philosophy which speaks of the collective nature of hope.
According to López Intzín (2019), the acts of prefiguring possible dignified life-worlds,
or the xWaychinel Lum-K’inal,

9
 ‘are not only individual acts devoid of collectivity, but rather a collective wherein the
family, the community, and the people may be imagined and incorporated—a felt-
thought “communality” [corazonar] that always existed in the collectivity of the present,
future, and past… historical acts of xWaychinel Lum-K’inal and the awakening
of ch’ulel are collective and individual acts, in which people’s hearts and minds are the first
space-territory where the seeds of struggle and liberation emerge or “in-surge.” (López
Intzín 2019).

López Intzín explains that Zapatismo is one possible concrete form of the xWaychinel
Lum-K’inal:

‘the force and power of the Word and the Voice have only been possible thanks to the
collective and communal Ch’ulel, where the Voice and the Word that are heard are
everyone’s…the arrival of the xWaychinel Lum-K'inal enables us – the people – to
prefigure our possible worlds of dignified life as the outcome of a historical collective
experience’ (López Intzin, 2019).

In the context given, of five centuries of oppression and invisibilisation, it is crucial

not to essentialise ‘indigeneity’ and see it as ‘a relational category with deep historical,
institutional and power-inflicted ontologies … that is affected by and plays a very
important role in the production of place and space.’ (Ioris, 2020: 3) When we speak
of the ‘creation of a new society’ it is important to recognise that the new is
intertwined with ancestral practices, which are memory rooted in the ‘past’, a past
that is present. Vázquez highlights that for indigenous people, to defend la tierra (the
land) is a ‘political responsibility [which is] revolutionary vis-à-vis the modern notion
of time, in which the present and presence are the sole locus of the real’ (Vázquez,
2011: 38). The Zapatistas’ new forms of self-government, i.e. the Good Government
Councils (Juntas de Buen Gobierno, JBG), brought ‘back’ Mayan traditions, habits
and customs into ‘new’ forms of autonomy: the principle of ‘command while obeying’
that rules the JBG is based on Mayan traditions of decision making in the indigenous
ejidos, an ancestral custom of self-government practice by the Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Ch’ol,
Mam, Zoque and Tojolabal peoples in Mexico.
Today, the defence of the land by indigenous people would benefit us all and
the ecological prefiguration of indigenous resistance should be treasured. There is
wisdom in these new-ancestral practices. The notion of pluriversality offered by

10
decolonial authors means ‘a critical dialogue between diverse critical
epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as opposed to a universal
world (Grosfoguel, 2009). Understood as ‘pluriversal politics’ (Escobar, 2020)
prefigurative politics can bring about a pluriversal world which as former Zapatista
Subcommander suggested once, in the world we want, everyone fits. We want a
world in which many worlds fit. (Subcommander Marcos, 2001). Each of these
worlds will offer their own ontological and epistemic groundings and cosmologies
(Kothari et al, 2019) and enrich the world.

Conclusion

I have argued that Bloch’s principle of hope, his ontology of the Not-Yet-Being and his
materialist process philosophy are indispensable tools of prefiguration because they
point to the unfinished condition of humans and the world, enable us to take hope onto
the realm of real possibility and to rethink the ways in which the revolutionary
transformation of the world occurs through the creation of concrete utopia. I posit how
educated hope discerns that to prefigure alternatives we must consider us and the world
in a process of becoming rather than in a state of being, and enable us to match our
hopes with the political tendencies that exist in the world. I also pointed at Bloch’s ‘warm
current’ of Marxism to grasp the utopian character of reality and the importance
concrete utopias in the process exposed the limits of Eurocentric understandings of
prefiguration by emphasizing the importance of forms of prefiguring ‘other‘ that emerge
from the struggle of indigenous movements against coloniality, oppression and
exploitation, and how in their case, they combine ancestral and new practices as well as
call into question the modern (Eurocentric) notion of linear time. Indigenous and non-
indigenous prefigurative struggles differ and they are pluriversal, rather than universal,
forms of resistance and anticipation. In both cases, prefiguration ‘is a question of
learning hope ... The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves
actively into what is becoming to which they themselves belong’ (Bloch, 1959/1986: 3).
Why should we learn and organise hope? Because we are not home… yet.

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