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Do You Know How to Bleed?
(reincantamentox.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Prefiguration is often understood as purely performative. "Behaving as if". For example, in Temporary Autonomous Zones that do not challenge existent power nor deal with the conflict coming from outside the prefigurative bubble.
"Building the new in the shell of the old" is just... change? It's the normal mutation of society. System shift, paradigm shift, etc etc.
Hmm, I would call the first (after Scott) "anarchist calistenics". It's about learning to undo the conditioning of capitalist / hierachical society. It can appear a bit performative, but it is often very eye-opening for people new to anarchist concepts.
Prefiguration is about concrete actions for building community support structures that allow groups of people to have alternatives and fallbacks. It is also about planting the seeds for structures that can take over in times of disaster or societal upheaval. A tool library, even if only small, is prefiguration for example. I also consider running this Lemmy instance as a prefigurative action.
"Building the new in the shell of the old" does not refer to reforming the existing system. It acknoledges that the capitalist system can not be reformed, but will likely collapse due to internal contradictions (or the effects of climate change etc). at some point. Thus parallel structures need to be established inside the current system, to be prepared and to teach people that alternatives are possible.
This is a very different way to use the term than how it is used in Europe and in the theory I read. For me prefigurative politics are raves (in the European sense), TAZ, worldbuilding workshops, etc etc.
For me, if it's done to make feel better the people setting it up, it is prefigurative. If it's done to solve real problems for real people who don't read theory, it's not prefigurative. You're already doing the thing, so there's nothing to prefigurate. If you believe that by doing it, a thousand other tool libraries will bloom, that's prefigurative again, because that's assuming that the current state of things is due to a lack of imagination and liberating subjective experiences, which didn't bring much so far. We have had at least 30-40 years of this, and most spaces and people who participated in such activities are still as powerless as they were in the past.
You you have an example of such theory? To me that smells like something Marxists would falsely claim to discredit the idea.
The slogan "building the new in the shell of the old" goes directly back to the syndicalists of the IWW, who originally used it to describe concrete action in the workplace to establish horizontal decision making structures etc. so that such worker owned cooperatives could prefigurate envisioned changes in larger society.
Prefiguration is also often used in contrast to revolutionary action. I.e. instead of waiting for or trying to instigate a revolution (which is unlikely to happen or at least not where and when you expect it), proponents of prefiguration argue that concrete actions in the here and now are more vital.
I don't read theory about prefigurative politics so no. I don't read much Marxist theory either and for sure not on praxis, which doesn't seem to be doing much better than prefigurative politics.
Nonetheless, I encounter a lot of people using the word in their papers, events, artworks or similar stuff and that's where I see the term used, rather than on theory.
Yeah, and in a way it didn't work. The cooperative movement never had the muscles to establish itself as a new paradigm. I say that as somebody working in cooperatives and doing consultancy for cooperatives. Cooperatives are bubbles of peace in a storm, but they won't stop the storm. They are not different than a TAZ in this sense, with the difference that the cooperative movement is a lot more aware of material conditions and the fact that by itself it will never be able to become the hegemonic form of production.
You could say the same about all leftist activity of the last 100 years or so. I don't find such absolute thinking to be very helpful 🤷
Well, the scarcity of results in the last few decades must put forward the idea that whatever has been tried before, didn't work. The new must be new also in the form of a new paradigm, not just a new methodology. Rejecting the old as unfit includes might include also rejecting the old theory, practices and identities.
Prefiguration at its best isn't just performative but actively creates the material conditions and social relations needed for systemic change - it's like planting seeds that eventualy grow into the forest that replaces the concrete.
Well, it hasn't been working so far. The last 30 years of conscious prefigurative politics didn't achieve much.
So what is your proposed alternative?
Doing politics without trying to create an arbitrary, imagined boundary between a system and its outside, the old and the new, the inside and the outside. Doing politics within history, resisting the urge to put yourself outside of it. No escapism, no coping, no otherworlding. Regaining agency by rooting yourself where you are and altering the system you're in to bring about a new system.
Is your proposal then to reform the existing system into a new one? To use the existing levers of power to attempt to rip that power away from those that are currently pulling them?
Which I wouldn't mind if it worked - but the original reason for prefigurative action was because this approach didn't seem to achieve anything. But I guess you're arguing that maybe the environment is different now and therefore more susceptible to change?
How do you see everyday people participating in this political movement - voting? canvassing? running for office?
I guess you see Mamdani as such an example? Tho I doubt anarchists would reject him just on the grounds of him being a reformist and therefore not valuable to the cause, in my experience any push towards a more socialist society is generally embraced and not rejected no matter where it comes from.
So, "reforming" is quite a loaded term so I wouldn't use it to avoid confusion. One way to explain this is "double system theory", namely the idea that a successful transition between two systems (any kind of system, not just social or political systems) happens only if the dismantling of the old happens in sync with the growth of the new and this growth can fulfill the needs of its participants better than the old. Anything else will eventually fail.
If you build a new system without fueling it with the resources that go to the old, you will be a cathedral in the desert that will eventually be abandoned to return to the old system. A lot of utopian communes and prefigurative politics might fall into this category. Also the idea of building socialism in a single state (the new) without dismantling global power structures that will eventually coup your country.
If you dismantle the old without building the new and therefore fulfilling the needs the old was fulfilling, you will encounter a lot of resistance. These are the forces of reaction during revolutionary struggles, for example, where revolutionary states end up compromising a lot to appease the needs of the population, or get toppled by entrenched interests.
Everything goes. Politics must be played with the full deck of cards. Find the points of leverage, understand what's the best form to apply such leverage and go for it. Sometimes voting, sometimes armed struggle, sometimes structure-based organizing. This is a subjective decision that must be done from the inside: this implies that I can speak for my own strategy and the strategy of my orgs, but I must suspend judgement on the strategy of others. No outside means also "no outside of my experience".
There are for sure a lot of novel elements in Mamdani and in what NYC-DSA is doing, even though they are still a very old-fashioned organization in many regards:
That sounds fairly similar to Dual Power/Counter Power
It is similar indeed. Dual power is a specific political implementation of the more general concept
I mean yeah that makes sense - but I've personally not seen examples of prefigurative building that have rejected funding and resources from the old system on ideological "purity" grounds - quite often the reason is that established systems just refuse to funnel resources into alternative systems that don't generate a profit.
As an example - I was involved in a waste reduction/swap shop (food, clothing, furniture, etc) cooperative that due to it's well established social value was getting council and some governmental finding for over 10 years - everyone involved in it would see it as a prefigurative example of the future of society of fulfilled low carbon living. However, due to austerity cuts and a profit seeking landlord, who was asking for 10 grand a month in rent (which was over a third of how much the coop was making) once the council could no longer funnel money into the landowners pocket - the project was no longer viable and folded.
Now do you think the people that were involved didn't do everything in their power to keep the project running? Not in the slightest - it's just that the system is so hostile to such endeavors that they're constantly fighting an uphill battle where one slip is enough to send you all the way down.
So while I do agree that ideally we'd funnel resources from the old to the new - time and time again it's been proven that relying on the existing precarious system only results in building on weak foundations that will take you down with them when they inevitable collapse.
And I'm not saying this to dissuade you from pursuing a dual system theory - I'm genuinely trying to figure out a way where we can build the sorely needed infrastructure of the future in any way possible - in a climate that takes 15 years to approve a 50 square feet low traffic street to pedestrian area conversion in a time where we're 25 years away from unprecedented climate catastrophy.
Your analysis is correct and I agree with the frame. My point is that there's no single point of resolution: creating unstable dependencies is inevitable, it is necessary because we are rooted in an existing system that controls most of the resources. The resources provided by the unstable dependency must be used to make yourself eventually independent and remove the unstable dependency, making the system or the single organization able to reproduce itself without the unstable dependency. If your proposal doesn't have a path to achieve reproduction and sustainability that is realistic given the resources available, it's prefigurative, in the sense that it doesn't create lasting change beyond the people that lived through that experience. People who will probably be burned out and in conflict with each other, but that's a different problem.
The double system theory anyway is a description of how system changes all the time, but won't tell you which projects are viable. That's part of strategy development and can be answered only subjectively and partially: the information necessary to develop such projects is never in a single place and cannot be accessed through armchair reasoning or debate. It is not an act of developing a blueprint but more like navigating. A lot of prefigurative efforts are very focused on the destination but forgot to bring the sail and a few planks to fix holes in the boat. "We are prefiguring the day in which we will reach our destination port", while the boat is filling with water.