What is Prefigurative Politics?
Prefigurative politics refers to strategies and practices employed by political activists to build alternative futures in the present and to effect political change by not reproducing the social structures that activists oppose. According to Carl Boggs, who coined the term, prefigurative politics aims to embody “within the ongoing political practice of a movement […] those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal,” thus aligning the means and the ends of social change.
At its core, prefigurative politics operates on the idea of means–ends consistency. In other words, the newly created structures and processes must prefigure the desired end by instantiating the central values that should underlie the new society. Rather than deferring liberation to a distant future achievable only through hierarchical organizations or state power, practitioners live out horizontal, egalitarian relationships now—in occupied squares, community assemblies, mutual aid networks, and collective decision-making spaces. In practice, they involve building a new society “within the shell of the old” by living out the values and social structures the group desires for the future.
Origins & Lineage
In his article “Marxism, prefigurative Communism, and the problem of workers’ control”, originally published in Radical America in 1977, Carl Boggs coined the term ‘prefigurative’ to describe the historical tradition and modern movements of radical politics in which modes of organization and social relations between participants takes precedence over achieving widespread structural change through conventional politics. The term “prefigurative politics” was introduced by two social theorists: Carl Boggs, who published two articles in 1977 referring to a prefigurative tradition, model, or task, and Wini Breines, who reformulated the term two years later as “prefigurative politics” in her discussion of the New Left.
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of a new wave of radical politics. With the May 1968 uprisings in France and the civil rights movements in the US as their core symbols, the new social movements and New Left embodied these principles. Within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, participants spoke of the desire to create the “beloved community” — a society that rejected bigotry and prejudice in all forms and instead embraced peace and brotherliness. This new world would be based on an “understanding, redeeming goodwill for all,” as Martin Luther King (an allied promoter of the concept) described it.
While Boggs formalized the term in 1977, the practices have deeper roots. Prefigurative politics has a long history in anarchist discourse and practice, representing the refusal to engage with representative politics and public institutions, and instead aiming to carve out autonomous spaces that may enable a new world to be built within the shell of the old world. Boggs wrote about prefiguration in the context of the revolutionary movements in Russia, Italy, Spain, and the US New Left.
How It’s Practiced
Prefigurative politics manifests through both organizational structure and direct action. Prefiguration has been widely associated with the modus operandi of the social movements that blossomed after the 1960s, drawing on anarchist-inspired principles, such as participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action.
In practice, this looks like: Consensus decision in the nightly General Assembly prefigured a directly democratic society in which centralization would be replaced by local councils and anti-exclusion tactics were utilized to ensure that traditionally marginalized voices were heard. The creation of counter-institutions such as the People’s Library, Meditation Space, and Free Kitchen, were run collectively and autonomously. Holding voluntary working groups to set up tents in occupied squares, serving food to participants, protecting them from police action, and keeping spaces of protest clean work to turn hierarchical power relations into inclusive and participatory practices.
When protesters in Seattle chanted “this is what democracy looks like,” they meant to be taken literally. In the best tradition of direct action, they not only confronted a certain form of power, exposing its mechanisms and attempting literally to stop it in its tracks: they did it in a way which demonstrated why the kind of social relations on which it is based were unnecessary.
Contemporary examples include The Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST) in Brazil. By occupying and cultivating unused land, the MST not only challenges the prevailing system of unequal land distribution but actively prefigures a more just and sustainable way of living, and the Zapatistas. By rejecting traditional hierarchical structures and embracing horizontal decision-making processes, the Zapatistas have established autonomous, self-governed communities that prioritize local empowerment and indigenous rights.
Prefigurative Politics Today
Spurred by events such as Occupy and Indignados, recent years have seen an upswing of interest in the concept of prefigurative politics in various strands of literature. This concept challenges the prevailing state-centric approach in the literatures on social movements and social change that sees existing political institutions as both the main target of mobilization and the main means of achieving political change.
Modern practitioners encounter prefigurative politics through mutual aid networks, worker cooperatives, food sovereignty movements, consensus-based decision-making circles, and community land trusts. From the 1960s onward, however, the approach has become both more clearly articulated and more widespread, such that one can now identify a stable prefigurative tendency or wing in a wide range of movements around the world, most notably in women’s, environmental, autonomous, peace, and indigenous rights movements, and on a more global scale in the movements against neoliberal globalization.
Recent scholarship also explores contemplative activism: the use of contemplation as a way of responding to global challenges. The political imagination of transformation that contemplative activists offer is a form of being (a state of existence) rather than doing (working towards a particular goal). This represents an expansion of prefigurative politics into spiritual and consciousness-focused domains, acknowledging that embodied transformation is itself political work.
Common Misconceptions
Prefigurative politics is not utopian fantasy or withdrawal from political struggle. This definition is derived from the historical lesson that movements that do not keep their practice in line with the revolutionary values they seek, inevitably end up reproducing the system they are trying to overthrow, although under a new ideological rationale. It is strategic, not merely expressive.
It is not incompatible with other forms of political engagement. Monticelli, while identifying prefiguration as avoidant of the state, stresses that representative, contentious, and prefigurative politics are not incompatible, providing radical municipalism as an example. Debate continues within movements about the proper relationship between prefigurative experiments and engagement with existing institutions.
Prefigurative politics is also not without tension or contradiction. Critics note that emphasis on process can slow organizing efforts, and that “structurelessness” can reproduce hidden hierarchies rather than eliminate them. The practice requires constant vigilance about whether internal dynamics truly embody stated values, particularly around race, class, gender, and accessibility.
How to Begin
For those interested in experiencing prefigurative politics firsthand, begin by locating existing experiments: worker cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid networks, consensus-based affinity groups, or autonomous social centers in your area. Participate in a general assembly or consensus decision-making process to observe means-ends alignment in action.
Key texts include Carl Boggs’s “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control” (1977), Wini Breines’s Community and Organization in the New Left (1982), David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) and The Democracy Project (2013), and Paul Raekstad and Sofi Gradin’s Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today (2019).
Practically, ask: Do your organizing structures embody the world you seek? Are decision-making processes inclusive, horizontal, and participatory? Does your group build skills, relationships, and capacities that would be needed in a liberated future? Prefigurative politics begins wherever activists refuse to defer freedom to tomorrow.