This register places Esperanto simply as an alternative to other languages—and a powerful one, in effect, given that it works on the basis of affective, ad hoc communication. Esperanto provides Idris with possibilities that the other languages he speaks do not offer—among other things, by allowing him to derive pleasure from language learning and use. Moreover, since the existence of the community built around Esperanto is regularly confirmed by its speakers' everyday decision to continue speaking the language, for Idris, this voluntary character of people's involvement with Esperanto (Wood 1979) meant that he could meet people who were generally more open to communicative exchanges through cosmopolitan sociabilities. Aside from making friends abroad and having access to first-hand news through Esperanto, Idris also made the most of Esperantujo to improve his Mandarin skills through his contact with Chinese Esperantists, with whom he had been practising spoken and written Mandarin online. Whenever he had a question or made a mistake, he could have his doubts addressed—in Esperanto.
8.3 Deeds, Not Words
Through making use of the language to reach practical purposes other than advancing it as a cause, Esperantists such as Martine, Daniel and Idris conceive of Esperanto primarily as a liberal project, centred on indi- viduals. Its liberal quality is reinforced by its speakers' focus on people's freedom of choice. In this vein, Esperanto is presumed to appeal to individuals—rather than to governments or entire ethnic or national groups—who are free to make language-related choices, without being compelled to learn and use Esperanto due to governmental, geographical, social or professional constraints. Just as only liberal and autonomous subjects can make the decision to engage with Esperanto, any individual Esperantist can play a decisive role and make a significant difference in Esperantujo. In this sense, without a handful of Chinese Esperan- tist acquaintances, Idris would not have found opportunities to practise his Mandarin skills regularly; without their Vietnamese friends, Martine and Daniel might never have gone beyond Europe. Likewise, without a singer who sang a song in Esperanto during a concert, this couple might never have come across this language and the possibilities it brought to them. The network-like character of this community makes every medi- ator and every connection in Esperantujo matter, creating a setting in which any Esperantist can bring in first-hand information and establish meaningful and affective contacts with others.
It is within this framework of a liberal, non-hegemonic, non- compulsory language that we can draw parallels between Esperan- tujo and experiments in prefiguration. Traditional left-wing politics— comprising political parties, trade unions and institutionalised social movements—work towards changing power relations at the state level by pressing governments, private companies and other institutionalised bodies for social change. By contrast, the so-called new social movements and the New Left—often illustrated by the mobilisations against the 1999 World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle (Graeber 2009, 2010; Maeckelbergh 2011; Teivainen 2016) and other alterglobalisation move- ments that followed—seek change through prefiguration. Prefigurative politics refer to attempts to construct alternative social relations in the present (Maeckelbergh 2011) through the efforts of social actors who embody and enact, via their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for wider society. Unlike social movements that have clear goals and that aim at macropolitical revolutions and reforms, those based on prefiguration are closely related to mundane practices, with their partic- ipants enacting practical experiments involving grassroots democracy, horizontal learning, direct action and alternative micropolitical power relations (Yates 2015). Hence, when environmentalists adopt a vegan diet and more sustainable lifestyles or when feminists create support groups to fight sexual harassment, these activists are not changing wider society directly, but pre-figuring or embodying, through everyday action, the political messages they aim to convey (Flesher Fominaya 2014). By equalling means and ends and acting in accordance with the social changes they desire, these activists' practices act upon the present to build open-ended political alternatives to present-day society.
Martine's and Daniel's—as well as Idris'—Esperanto-related mundane practices prefigure their quest for alternative approaches to interna- tional communication, with Esperanto becoming for them a matter of deeds, more than simply words—even though the language and most of these communicative deeds pass by words. Their goal was not to promote Esperanto at the global level or seek support for the language among governments and institutions. Rather, their means equalled their ends and were enacted through their language use and their present- day engagements with this community, thus materialising their ideal Esperantujo.
Using the expression anarchist process, David Graeber (2010: 123) describes the process through which the principles of self-organisation, voluntary association, direct action and mutual aid—often perceived as anarchist-inspired prefigurative practices—have been increasingly adopted by a wide range of activists. Graeber (2010: 124; 2002: 72, foot- note 6) draws a distinction between what he calls capital-A and small-a anarchists. While the former tend to operate within anarchist groups, the latter mobilise characteristically prefigurative practices despite not neces- sarily conceiving of themselves as anarchists—or even as activists. Along these lines, it is worth considering how such an anarchist process also takes place among those who prefigure more egalitarian international communication, foster horizontal learning spaces and build networks to share first-hand information.
As Esperantists draw on prefigurative politics without being capital-A anarchists, the parallels between the anarchist process and Esperanto- related practices are only partial. Firstly, because the anarchist process carried out by capital-A anarchists is likely, or at least expected, to be all-encompassing: their actions are about transforming society by ques- tioning and ending authority, hierarchy and the concentration of power (Graeber 2010). The Esperanto-mediated practices of small-a anarchists, in turn, tend to concentrate on language issues. Secondly, while capital-A anarchists would refrain from appealing to the state and other insti- tutional bodies, Esperantists such as Martine and Daniel might avoid traditional touristic infrastructure (comprising commercial lodging, offi- cial guides and well-known attractions), but this does not mean that they would utterly refuse to show their passport at border control or stay in a hotel, for instance. Similarly, Idris may prefer affective, ad hoc commu- nication over mass communication, but he also reads newspapers and occasionally shares content publicly in French and English on digital media.