Prefigurative Politics. Paul Raekstad

Acknowledgements

Paul would like to thank: my mother and my friends for their love and support throughout this process. Also (all names from here on in alphabetical order) Eivind Dahl, Enzo Rossi, Mathijs van de Sande, and Zoe Addis for reading over the manuscript and offering us their very valuable advice, and the members of the Cambridge Heterodox Philosophy Colloquium and The Aurora Circle for discussions on the ideas that have fed into this book. Part of Paul’s work on this book has previously appeared as ‘Revolutionary Practice and Prefigurative Politics: A Clarification and Defence’, Constellations 25(3), 2018, pp. 359–72. Paul would like to thank the editor of Constellations and two anonymous referees for their insightful feedback and help with improving the article. That article was in turn the result of a bunch of work that Paul started doing as a side project to their PhD, and has benefited from lots of feedback from many different people, in particular Ammar Ali Jan, Dan Swain, Lorna Finlayson Wheeler, Mahvish Ahmad, Raymond Geuss, Tabitha Spence, and Zoe Addis. All deserve thanks for their very helpful discussions on these topics and comments on the drafts and papers that this article and significant parts of this book are based on. Those papers have been presented at the Historical Materialism Conference at the University of York, Toronto in 2014, the Political Studies Annual Conference in both 2015 and 2017, the International Workshop on Emancipatory Theory in 2016, the Association for Social and Political Philosophy Annual Conference in 2016, the Marx 2016 Conference in Stockholm 2016, and the Loughborough University Anarchism Research Group’s Speaker-Series in 2018. Paul would like to thank the participants at all these conferences and workshops for their input and feedback – in particular Ali Yalçın Göymen, David Berry, Ruth Kinna, Thomas Swann, and Uri Gordon.

      Saio would like to thank: my sister Emma Gradin for lifelong discussions and for the emotional and intellectual support you’ve given me while writing this book. Xan Randall for discussing thoughts and ideas, reading drafts of chapters and giving wise advice. Grietje Baars for the many and long discussions, the support, and the invaluable advice on writing and publishing. Katherine McMahon and Jo Chattoo for reading and commenting on drafts of some of my chapters in this book. Thank you also to my PhD supervisors Ray Kiely and Robbie Shilliam who gave me huge amounts of feedback and guidance when I was first developing these ideas as a research student at Queen Mary, University of London. So did Jenna Marshall – thank you for our discussions and your insights. The ideas I’ve put into this book have also been shaped by the activities and discussions with countless activists and friends, including my best comrades in the International Organisation for a Participatory Society, Harpreet Kaur Paul, David Dominic, and Robert Bennie, and the folks of Queer Mutiny Bristol many years ago. I’ve also learned so incredibly much from running workshops and making sense of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism together with Leonie Blacknell-Taylor. Thanks also to Claire from Plan C and Fanny from Research For Action for checking some of my facts on British prefigurative movements.

      The authors would also like to thank the four reviewers and George Owers, editor at Polity Books, for their valuable input and suggestions.