Summary
Prefigurative politics means organising now as you want the future society to work, so that a movement’s means match its ends. Carl Boggs coined the term in 1977, for movements that embody “those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience” that are their goal. The idea is older: nineteenth-century anarchists argued that a free society couldn’t come out of an authoritarian organisation, and the Industrial Workers of the World spoke of building the new “within the shell of the old”.
Examples include the Zapatistas’ self-government, the Occupy camps and community land trusts. Since the future can’t be known in detail, Paul Raekstad notes, such practice has to be experimental.
Rationale
The term isn’t in our articles, but its premise is: how work is done teaches as much as what it says. Our caution: “A community garden can still reproduce exclusion”, so we’d watch what happens.