With the far right firmly in control of the federal government, the prospects for legal and policy reform at the national level will be severely constrained, if not entirely non-existent, in the years ahead. Confronted with this reality, some progressive lawyers have shifted their focus to state policy, while others have started planning for a post-Trump future. Without impugning these efforts, we believe that the current moment also highlights the importance of thinking beyond the state, and of thinking about the here and now. For movement lawyers, in particular, this moment offers an urgent opportunity to practice prefigurative lawyering at a local level.
Prefigurative lawyering views social transformation as an active process of remaking social relations and our conditions of being. According to this approach, we must create the world we want to live in now—beyond the state and with new forms of relationships to each other and to land. At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, where we both work, we practice prefigurative politics by striving to embody the values we wish to see in a liberated future. Our work begins within ourselves and percolates outwards, helping to shape how we relate to movement partners in the co-creation of non-capitalist ecosystems based on care and cooperation.
What does this look like in practice? In this brief post, we describe how we practice prefiguration internally and with one of our movement partners, POOR Magazine, an unhoused and poor-people led movement organization based in Huchiun (Ohlone name for East Bay, CA).
A Novel Approach to Movement Lawyering
In recent years, several scholars have noted the rise of movement lawyering, an approach to lawyering in solidarity with social movements. Movement lawyers aim to help build grassroots power, which itself can be used to enact legal and policy changes. By aligning with and supporting contemporary social movements, movement lawyers often aim to fundamentally transform the state from its settler colonialist and capitalist foundations. Yet however revolutionary this horizon, movement lawyers face two recurrent challenges.
First, as lawyers who are trained to interface with the state, movement lawyers may mistake the state as the central locus for change. How can we practice movement lawyering without being overly dependent on formal political processes (including litigation and policy platforms) to enact change? Can we nurture grassroots transformation by centering love and hospicing away the law? We (the authors of this post, not representing the Law Center’s diverse views) do not view the state as a neutral vessel capable of seismic transformations. Rather, we understand the state as a historically contingent container of capitalist social relations, such that transformation of the state is never the end. Instead, we hold the abolition of capitalism as our end—replacing it with more loving ways of meeting our needs and relating to land—and doing so requires abolishing the state as we know it. Any engagement with the state should thus be viewed as a matter of strategy, and participatory and solidarity-based forms of governance must be nurtured to transform our political economy.
Second, movement lawyers may struggle to move beyond the reactive limits of the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC), which, when effective, preserves a fictitious harmony between capital and labor under the guise of multiculturalism (“diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging”). Operating within the dominant ideological constraints of the NPIC, movement lawyers may at best strive to achieve further decriminalization and a greener version of social democracy under the radical platforms of “abolition” and “socialism.” Nevertheless, we are set up to fall short of these lofty horizons and leave untouched the foundational logics of property, wage, and value form—such that capitalism remains intact, and people remain caught in between immiserating cycles of wage dependency and precarity. Moreover, movement lawyers are incentivized by the NPIC to be productivity-oriented and hierarchical (e.g., selecting a charismatic Executive Director), which risks further entrenching capitalist ways of being.
In offering this criticism, we do not mean to imply that the Law Center is immune from these pressures. With attacks by the current administration on many frontline communities and movement organizations, the Law Center is presently engaged in a healthy dose of reactive lawyering to respond to the challenges of the moment. Plus, we have a long history of engaging in policy advocacy, and as a primarily grant-funded nonprofit with 18 full-time staff, we are vulnerable to the constraints of the NPIC.
But, we try to remain nimble by engaging in “constant reflection and self-reflection” to assess how our tactics relate to or depart from our vision for a new world. We remain cautious that operating in legible domains as legal professionals reinforces settler colonial or capitalist permanence. Thus, we simultaneously cultivate partnerships like with POOR Magazine that bring to life what land liberation and poor people’s self-determination can look like while minimizing the involvement of the state. Our horizontal and collective structure (described below) illustrates non-hierarchical forms of organization that buck corporate-capitalist norms, and we build long-term relationships with partners grounded in respect and reciprocity.
The Transformation of a Law Center
To date, nascent conversations about prefigurative lawyering have primarily focused on reconceptualizing the relationship between lawyers and movement partners. In our experience, however, transformation must begin within. In an interview towards the end of her life, Grace Lee Boggs remarked that “we have to change ourselves in order to change the world.” Her conception of revolution had shifted from its classical, Western conception—in which revolution is understood as a “compressed decisive event”—to the view that revolution required the creation of new, humanizing systems, beginning with ourselves. As prefigurative lawyers, we recognize Boggs’ wisdom by co-stewarding an organization built on care, cooperation, and commitment—alternative relational paradigms to the alienating, competitive, and transactional natures of workplaces under capitalism.
The liberatory content flows from our organizational form. The Law Center is formally structured as a worker self-directed nonprofit (WSDN). A WSDN is a nonprofit where the workers themselves have democratic control over the nonprofit’s governance, operations, and decision-making processes. Notably, workers participate directly in major decisions about organizational direction and policies, while the Law Center’s board plays a reduced role by respecting the participatory leadership of staff. All workers may bring a proposal at the appropriate Circle meeting, which will trigger rounds of clarifying questions, discussion, and feedback. Over time, the Law Center decided to shed itself of an Executive Director role.
In practicing democratic governance, we are learning to step into our power as individuals—which involves introspection on and advocacy of our own core commitments, reassessment and releasing of rigid or selfish viewpoints, and adaptation and flexibility towards the betterment of the collective.
The stakes are higher when we make decisions that impact the entire collective. Our individual visions of liberation and theories of change are no longer abstract, but instead are directly related to the types of clients and work we pursue and how we spend our money. While each member has the autonomy to shape their own work portfolios, we also invest time in collective political education: analyzing ethical and strategic questions on how to relate to the state, what it means to liberate land under a private property regime, and how to build a solidarity economy where capitalism withers away.
We transform ourselves by transforming how we relate to each other, including our habitual approaches to conflict. We attempt to deepen our relationships through conflict, rather than avoid or punish. We learn to implement restorative practices, and thus, our commitment and care for each other grows. We value rest and recovery. We become a part of something bigger than our individual social identities as constructed by capitalism—part of a beautiful, co-created collective. In turn, we strive to replicate these dynamics with our “clients,” and in so doing, increasingly become accomplices and partners in collective liberation.
POOR Magazine and Building a New World
Our work with POOR Magazine embodies the relational approach we think is important in prefigurative lawyering. Founded in 1996 by Dee & Tiny Gray-García, a houseless, Indigenous mother and daughter, POOR Magazine is a poor people-led movement organization located in Huchiun. The organization works to provide revolutionary media access for silenced voices, preserve and de-gentrify rooted communities of color, and re-frame debates about poverty, landlessness, disability, and race.
We walk alongside them as they uplift poor people’s solutions to poverty and houselessness—exemplified by their Homefulness model, a houseless peoples-led “HEALing solution to homelessness.” Unlike state-led solutions like shelters and tiny cabins that mimic carceral logics and practices, Homefulness is a sanctuary of healing and rent-free housing by and for poor people. The first Homefulness project in Oakland currently houses 25 formerly houseless residents and is also a site of Indigenous ceremony, mutual aid, and organizing.
Both of us have been transformed by our relationships with POOR Magazine. We have participated in People Skool, an educational seminar led by their community of youth, adults, and elders who share their knowledge of poverty, rooted in lived experience rather than institutional education. Our weekly meetings with POOR Magazine are substantively different from traditional lawyer-client meetings: based on trust and reciprocity, we co-strategize on matters spanning the sacred, law, communications, organizing, and engaging with “politricksters.” We have also collaborated on protests and press conferences amidst the City of Oakland’s increasingly violent attacks on poor people.
Meanwhile, we have the opportunity to engage in some of the most fulfilling work of our lives: Veryl worked on a first-of-its-kind Liberation Easement that POOR Magazine granted to its close partner, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an Ohlone-led organization committed to land rematriation. The Easement empowers the Land Trust to ensure that Homefulness never becomes commodified—it cannot be sold for profit and rent can never be charged on the land. Moh has worked for the last year on a campaign to bring Homefulness to Yelamu (Ohlone name for San Francisco), where a new mayor has escalated sweeps and where housing and healing sanctuary is desperately needed. This has not only involved legal work to assist in a colonial “real estate transaction,” but also organizing alongside others with wealth and class privilege to unlearn corrosive capitalist tendencies like wealth hoarding.
Much of the Law Center’s work fits within the solidarity economy movement. With POOR Magazine, we are consciously trying to resist the capitalist cooptation of solidarity economies by centering the rematriation of land. The Liberation Easement is but one example of rejecting all methods of land desecration and profiteering. It is also an example of ecosystem building with First Nations relatives based on permission, care, and reciprocity. When land is healed, we begin to restore pathways that reduce our dependency on capitalist forms of social reproduction by receiving from the abundance of Mother Earth. By connecting solidarity economics and land return, we resist the “issue area” silos characteristic of the NPIC. We acknowledge the interconnectedness of land and labor, and that liberation of all living beings is necessary in the face of ongoing capitalist and ecological catastrophes.
Beginning within ourselves and with partners like POOR Magazine, we are remaking social relations inherent to the violent capitalist system by building healing sanctuaries that operate in the spirit of love. Together, we are engaged in a prefigurative project of building the new world in the carcass of the old. The time for prefigurative lawyering is now.
