Prefigurative Politics:
Workers Self-Management from Argentina to the Balkans
Andrej Grubacic and
Marina Sitrin
8 Sessions: Tuesdays, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m., Oct. 24 – Dec. 12
Tuition: $90 – $115, Sliding scale
We will explore prefigurative politics through the lens of contemporary and
historical experiments in workers self-management. Prefigurative politics, the
weaving of the present with the future, will be discussed as a part of the
anarchist tradition and grounded in various movements that are explicitly or
implicitly anarchist.
We will look at experiences in Spain in the 1930s and the system of
self-management in the former Yugoslavia. We will, also, examine the
contemporary experiences of recuperated workplaces in Argentina and some of its
unemployed workers movements, such as Solano and Allen. We may address current
formations in Venezuela, linked to this history while also distinguished from
it.
Michael Albert and Robin Hanel’s work on participatory economics will be
examined, as well, in our exploration of self-management and prefigurative
politics.
Andrej Grubacic has specific experience living self-management in Yugoslavia.
Andrej, a historian and social critic, works with the Planetary Alternatives
Network, Z Communications and Peoples Global Action. As a result of his
political activism, Andrej was forced to leave the University of Belgrade and
move to SUNY Binghamton.
Marina Sitrin is an anti-authoritarian activist, writer, teacher and dreamer.
Marina has spent time in Argentina working with the autonomous social movements
and compiling an oral history,
Horizontalidad: Voices of Popular Power in
Argentina.