Prefigurative politics is the practice of building the social relations you want in the present rather than deferring them to a future that will arrive after a revolution, an election, or an institutional reform. If the goal is a society without hierarchy, the movement pursuing that goal must itself be non-hierarchical. If the goal is freedom, the struggle for freedom must be conducted freely. The means must embody the ends.
This is not merely a moral preference — it is a structural claim. Organizations reproduce their internal logic in the world they create. A movement organized through a centralized party with a leadership hierarchy will, if it succeeds, produce a centralized society with a leadership hierarchy. A movement organized through consensus, federation, and voluntary association will produce social relations shaped by those practices. The Russian Revolution demonstrated the first pattern: the Bolshevik party, organized hierarchically, seized the state and produced a hierarchical state. The Spanish anarchist collectives of 1936–1939 demonstrated the second: organizations that practiced self-organization internally produced self-organized communities.
Prefigurative politics distinguishes anarchism from both liberal reform and Leninist revolution. Liberal reform accepts the existing hierarchy — the state, capitalism, electoral politics — and works within it, deferring meaningful change to a future that never arrives because the structures that prevent change are the structures the reformers rely on. Leninist revolution accepts hierarchical party organization as a necessary step toward eventual equality, deferring freedom to a post-revolutionary future — but the hierarchical party, once in power, has no structural reason to dissolve itself, and historically never has.
Prefiguration happens in every act of mutual aid, every affinity group, every consensus decision, every direct action, every community that organizes its own food, shelter, education, or defense without depending on the state or the market. These are not rehearsals for a future revolution — they are the revolution itself, happening now, on whatever scale is available. Dual power — the strategy of building alternative institutions alongside and against existing ones — is prefigurative politics as sustained practice.
Related terms
- Revolution — the transformation prefiguration enacts in the present
- Freedom — the condition prefiguration practices rather than defers
- Hierarchy — the structure prefiguration refuses to reproduce
- Self-organization — the capacity prefigurative practice develops
- Mutual aid — prefiguration as cooperative practice
- Direct action — prefiguration as unmediated action
- Temporal autonomy — the time prefigurative process requires
- Voluntary association — the principle prefigurative organization embodies