Prefiguring the future or repeating the past?: Collectivist democracy and the struggle against oligarchy in the German left

Prefigurative social movements try to bring about their vision of the future by implementing it in their current practice:  in their organizational forms, decision-making processes, and tactical choices, they try to live according to the values and principles they think should govern society as a whole. While the prefigurative impulse dates back at least to the French Revolution, it has been experiencing a resurgence in recent decades, as many activists in advanced capitalist societies have lost faith in both parliamentary and paramilitary strategies for radical change. Influenced by anarchist philosophy and well aware of the usual tendency toward oligarchy, these movements try to put their egalitarian ideals into practice through the use of non-hierarchical, collectivist-democratic forms of organization and consensus decisionmaking.

While scattered case studies shed light on some of their common dilemmas and practices, almost no systematic research has been done to evaluate the ability of such groups to resist hierarchical authority and prevent the development of oligarchic control. In this paper I present findings from a cross-sectional comparison of 12 collectivist-democratic social movement groups, drawn from two leftist movement countercultures in Germany: the nonviolence movement and the “autonomous” movement (known as the Autonomen). Over the last 30 years, these two countercultures have developed distinct forms of collectivist democracy, marked by different ways of dividing labor and running meetings, different decision-making processes, and different tactical orientations. 

On the basis of two years of participant observation and 63 semi-structured interviews with a matched sample of activists from each counterculture, this paper first describes their contrasting styles of collectivist democracy and then discusses the perhaps counterintuitive finding that the more militant Autonomen were less proned to oligarchy than the nonviolence groups.