If politics is essentially about ‘ends and means’, then this implies that political actors must always have a clear end in sight (Dewey 1973). But is this necessarily the case? Recent occupy movements such as Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the Spanish 15-M movement and Nuit Debout were met with great scepticism. What, it was asked, were these movements actually for (Frank 2013)? Why did they often refuse to present an implementable agenda or strategy (Mirowski 2013: 327)? However, many of these occupy movements explicitly rejected such an instrumentalist logic.

How, then, should the relation between the employed means and the pursued ends of radical politics be understood from a prefigurative perspective? This relation has been conceptualised in a number of ways. In the following sections, I discuss three of these conceptualisations and critically assess them in the context of contemporary protest movements. First, in anarchist theory the principle of ‘prefiguration’ is often taken to prescribe a high measure of consistency between the applied means and the ultimate ends of revolutionary politics (Franks 2003: 16). But this implies that participants always act with a clear end in sight, which often is not the case. Alternatively, prefiguration could be conceived of as a ‘rehearsal’, the ends of which are open to continuous reformulation. Prefiguration then is viewed as an experimental attempt to act ‘as if’ the desired change is already in place –for instance, in order to gain a better understanding of the exact change that one wants to see in the future. However, by interpreting prefiguration as a rehearsal of future ends, one risks downplaying the immediate experience that it entails for those involved. Another possibility, which is more open to this experiential character, would be to argue that prefiguration caters to a plurality of (individually held) ends, rather than a single, common end. The problem with this interpretation, however, is that it tends to overlook the political and collective character of prefigurative democracy. I therefore propose a fourth option: rather than redefine the relation between means and ends, prefigurative democracy may be understood to refute this category altogether. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s understanding of political action, I argue that prefigurative politics should be conceived as a beginning without ends. Such an open-ended conceptualisation of prefigurative democracy sheds a different light on the practices of contemporary social movements.