Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

V. The Democratic Potential of Prefigurative Direct Action
The Reduction of Radical Democratic Politics to Resistance 
In the previous section, I argued that disruptive direct actions – actions that transcend 
communication and involve enactments of collective power – can have important democratic 
potential. However, to reduce direct action to disruptive protest – to acts of resistance – is to 
miss an element crucial to direct action: prefiguration. Indeed, what best distinguishes direct 
action from other forms of protest and collective action (aside from its aforementioned 
transcendence of communication) is its orientation toward creating a future in the present. I 
believe that the prefigurative side of direct action offers a way to theorize radical democracy that 
is not reduced to a politics of protest. Indeed, it is a mistake and a cop-out to reduce direct action 
to disruption. While theorists such as Ranciere and Piven offer a compelling account of why 
disruptive collective action – even when it extends beyond communication – are core democratic 

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practices, they say much less about what, if anything, ought to 
replace
the “police” order.
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Instead, democratic action is reduced to temporary moments of intervention and resistance. 
Sheldon Wolin has perhaps given the clearest expression of this view: democracy can 
never function as a sustained political system or as mode of collective self-governance. History 
demonstrates that moments of democratic commonality are rare and, when they do occur, they 
are fleeting. Wolin argues that such an outcome in inevitable: “Democratic political 
interventions are, at the national level, necessarily episodic or fugitive” (Wolin 2008, 290).
Though Wolin (1992, 251) acknowledges that participants in disruptive actions aim to create 
new norms – “bearing the markers of an obsession with participation and equality as well as an 
intoxication with the first experience of power, the experience of cooperation, common sacrifice, 
and common concern” – attempts to forge a lasting democratic practice are doomed. Thus, for 
Wolin, democracy is consigned to the fleeting moments in which citizens reassert themselves to 
challenge exclusion or injustice, or otherwise address an issue of common concern. As such, 
citizens are constantly stuck in the defensive position of trying to “recover lost ground” (Wolin 
2008, 258). Disruptive democratic actions, then, are theorized as reactions and resistance. 
As Dean (2009, 178, fn. 24) puts it in relationship to Ranciere’s thought:
If disruption is the essence of politics, then governance is necessarily 
depoliticizing. This view of governance allows for a kind of permanent 
contestation without any responsibility for actual decisions and implementation.
The resulting left politics is reduced to a politics of resistance. 
While I might eschew the language of “governance” as the only alternative to a language of 
“resistance,” I generally agree with her point. I believe that we both want to move left politics 
beyond a politics of resistance (without denying that disruption and resistance are critical) and 
29
This is perhaps not a problem for Ranciere who conceptualizes the “police” as a necessary counterpart to 
“politics,” but it is a problem for anarchists and others like Dean who wish to not just intervene upon, but to change, 
the social order. 

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towards a positive vision of an alternative society. Contrary to Dean, however, I do not believe 
this requires that we abandon democracy. The way that direct action combines disruption and 
prefiguration offers a way out of this dilemma. To put this differently, I contend that radical 
democrats like Ranciere and Wolin have taken seriously the anarchic project of disruption and 
resistance, while neglecting, if not rejecting, anarchists’ positive political commitments to the 
creation of a free, egalitarian and radically democratic society. Democracy, therefore, becomes a 
mere intervention on the ‘police’ order, rather than a radical (in the sense of advocating 
fundamental, social, economic and political change) vision of how to change the ‘police’ order 
itself. While Ranciere conceptualizes democracy in a way that foregrounds the