Prefigurative politics are modes of organization andsocial relationships that strive to reflect the futuresociety being sought by agroup.^[1] In practice, they involve building a new society "within the shell of the old" by living out thevalues andsocial structures the group desires for the future.^[2]

According toCarl 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.^[3] Prefigurative politics are sometimes justified based on the premise that the ends a social movement can achieve are "fundamentally shaped by the means it employs."^[4]Prefigurativism is the attempt to enact prefigurative politics.

Boggs wrote about prefiguration in the context of the revolutionary movements in Russia, Italy, Spain, and the USNew Left. In 1979Sheila Rowbotham applied the concept to theLondon Free School, which she claimed prefigured the politics of the early libertarians of the early 1970s.^[5] In the following year Wini Breines, the then-professor of sociology and women's studies inNortheastern University, applied the concept to the USStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS).^[6] In 1984, John L. Hammond applied the concept to thePortuguese Revolution.^[7]

The politics of prefiguration rejected thecentrism andvanguardism of many of the groups and political parties of the 1960s. It is both a politics of creation, and one of breaking withhierarchy. Breines wrote:

The term prefigurative politics [...] may be recognized in counter institutions, demonstrations and the attempt to embody personal and anti-hierarchical values in politics.Participatory democracy was central to prefigurative politics. [...] The crux of prefigurative politics imposed substantial tasks, the central one being to create and sustain within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that "prefigured" and embodied the desired society.^[8]

For Breines, "prefigurative politics" centers on "participatory democracy", understood as an ongoing opposition to hierarchical andcentralized organization that requires a movement that develops and establishes relationships and political forms that "prefigure" theegalitarian anddemocratic society that it seeks to create. Furthermore, she sees prefigurative politics as strictly connected to the notion ofcommunity, referring to it as a network of relationships that are more direct, more personal, and more total than the formal, abstract and instrumental relationships that are embedded in contemporary state and society.^[9]

Anarchists around the turn of the twentieth century clearly embraced the principle that the means used to achieve any end must be consistent with that end, though they apparently did not use the term "prefiguration". For example,James Guillaume, a comrade ofMikhail Bakunin, wrote, "How could one want an equalitarian and free society to issue fromauthoritarian organisation? It is impossible."^[10]

One of the greatest examples during the 20th century in this regard is the comunismo libertario (libertarian communism) society organized byanarcho-syndicalists such as theConfederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), or in English the National Confederation of Labour, for a few months during theSpanish Civil War. Workers took collective control of themeans of production on a decentralized level and used mass-self communication as acounter-power in order to give useful information on a wide range of options, fromvegetarian cooking to the treatment ofsexually transmitted infections.^{[citation needed]}

The concept of prefiguration later came to be used more widely,^[11] especially in relation to movements for participatory democracy.^[12][13][14] It has especially been applied toItalian Autonomism in the 1960s,^[15] theUS antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s and theanti-globalization movement at the turn of the 21st century.^[16]

AnthropologistDavid Graeber inFragments of an Anarchist Anthropology described the prefigurative politics of those at the1999 Seattle WTO protest:

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. This is why all the condescending remarks about the movement being dominated by a bunch of dumb kids with no coherent ideology completely missed the mark. The diversity was a function of the decentralized form of organization, and this organizationwas the movement's ideology. (p. 84)

Political theoristsPaul Raekstad andSaio Gradin define prefigurative politics as:

the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now.^[17]

They argue that prefigurative politics is essential for developing agents with the powers, drives, and consciousness to reach a free, equal, and democratic future society.^{[citation needed]}

According toAdrian Kreutz, Political Theorist atNew College, Oxford, the practice of prefigurative politics, or prefigurativism, can be defined as:

a way of engaging in social change activism that seeks to bring about this other world by means of planting the seeds of the society of the future in the soil of today's. [...] Prefigurativism is a way of showing what a world without the tyranny of the present might look like. It is a way of finding hope (but notescapism!) in the realms of possibility––something that words and theories alone cannot provide. [...] As a form of activism, prefigurativism highlights the idea that your means match the ends you can expect. It highlights that social structures enacted in the here-and-now, in the small confines of our organisations, institutions and rituals mirror the wider social structures we can expect to see in the post-revolutionary future.^[18]

Additionally, Darcy K. Leach wrote in theWiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements that:

For much of its history, the prefigurative impulse was only characteristic of the beginning stages of a rebellion and faded as the movement became more centralized. 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, andindigenous rights movements, and on a more global scale in the movements against neoliberal globalization^[19]

Boggs analyzed three common patterns of decline in the prefigurative movements which are the following:

Jacobinism, in which popular forums are repressed or their sovereignty usurped by a centralized revolutionary authority;spontaneism, a strategic paralysis caused parochial or anti-political inclinations inhibit the creation of broader structures of effective coordination; andcorporativism, which occurs when anoligarchic stratum of activists isco-opted, leading them to abandon the movement's originally radical goals in order to serve their own interests in maintaining power.^[20]

• What began as a rebellion of theZapatista Army of National Liberation (Spanish:Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) in 1994, quickly morphed into a social movement that criticized both national and global power structures and sought the empowerment of local communities through everyday practices of de factoautonomy.^[21] After negotiations with the state failed regardingindigenous rights and culture, theZapatistas proceeded to develop their own structures ofself-government, autonomous education, healthcare, justice, and agrarian and economic relations, among other transformative practices.^[22] This movement continues to raise important issues such as the role of culture and identity in popular mobilization, social spaces for organizing, the possibility of redefining power from below, and moreover have posed self-reflective questions about conventional definitions of politics, Westernpositivist epistemologies and about the need ofdecolonizing research in general and in oppressed communities in particular.^[23]
• Thecommunity land trust model provides a method of providing cooperatively-owned, resident-controlled permanent housing, outside of thespeculative market.^{[citation needed]}
• InArgentina, the occupation and recuperation of factories by workers (such asZanon), the organizing of many of theunemployed workers movements, and the creation ofpopular neighborhood assemblies reflect the participants' desire forhorizontalism, which includes equal distribution of power among people, and the creation of new social relationships based on dignity and freedom.^{[citation needed]}
• Theoccupation movements of 2011in Egypt and the Arab world, in Spain, and in the United States embodied elements of prefiguration (explicitly in the case ofOccupy Wall Street and its spinoffs inoccupations around the United States). They envisaged creating a public space in the middle of American cities for political dialogue and achieved some of the attributes of community in providing free food, libraries, medical care, and a place to sleep.^[24] In Spain, the15-M movements and take-the-square movements organized themselves and stood up for "a real democracy, a democracy no longer tailored to the greed of the few, but to the needs of the people."^[25][26]
• TheBlack Panther Party of the United States led a variety of community social programs from the early 1960s, which sought to realize the Party'sTen Point Program. Programs includedFree Breakfast for Children, community health clinics, and after-school programs and Liberation Schools that focused on Black history, writing skills, and political science.^{[citation needed]}
• Cooperation Jackson is an organization in Jackson, Mississippi, that aims to build asolidarity economy through prefigurative politics from ground-up as a foundation for Blackself-determination and broader social transformation. It is rooted in the Jackson-Kush Plan, a long-term vision for radical change developed by the New Afrikan People's Organization and theMalcolm X Grassroots Movement.^[27]
• The globalBaháʼí Faith community strives to realise amodel of society by developing a pattern of community life and administrative systems in ways which increasingly embody the principles contained in itsprinciples and teachings, which include the oneness of mankind,gender equality, and harmony of science and religion.^[28] Several authors have written about the community's grassrootspraxis as a living experiment in how to progressively instantiate religious or spiritual teachings in the real world.^[29][30][31]

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