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.

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.

How do you see everyday people participating in this political movement - voting? canvassing? running for office?

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".

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.

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:

• full embrace of structure-based organizing, which is not new as a practice, but its resurgence often frames this as the primary source of power.
• pragmatic communication
• hostility to purism and sectarianism
• general disengagement with leftist infighting, including their own internal conflict with the national. They go their own way, they use their points of leverage, they lead by example.

You you have an example of such theory? To me that smells like something Marxists would falsely claim to discredit the idea.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A tool library, even if only small, is prefiguration for example.

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.

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.

Well, it hasn't been working so far. The last 30 years of conscious prefigurative politics didn't achieve much.

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.

it's your life, you decide. You can also decide not to give it meaning.

There's plenty of neo-nazis in the Free Software movement. It's "Free Software", not "Free People"

Well, Obsidian, Notion, Anytype, Affine can give you a hint of possible directions in this transition. While they still retain document-oriented features, like the concept of Page, they also try to really go for a much richer experience that does away with the limitations inherited from paper-based solutions. Double-linking, composability, fractal properties of pages and nesting (especially in Notion and Anytype), block-based UI, seamless integration of text, databases, and embeds, heavy use of transclusion and other stuff like that.

I would say this alternative system is far from cohesive and mature, but it's clear some software is emancipating itself from whatever Onlyoffice represents.

Maybe you would find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXiQlLHuK7g

The mistake of this logic is to believe that this betrayal of electoral logic won't radicalize people. It is a necessary step. There are now 11 Million French people, many of which probably don't believe much in electoralism but vote anyway, who are furious at what's happening.

People don't change their mind listening to arguments, they change their mind living experiences. The experience of joy after winning, followed by the disregard of democratic logic by Macron, will mobilize an insane amount of popular energy, contrary to snarky "electoralism doesn't work" comments that are relatable only to a microscopic niche of edgy, maximalist leftists.

Larping as a tankie is definitely a thing of immature, terminally online kids, but I wouldn't throw Lenin in the bunch. While Stalin is mostly condemned as a reactionary psychopath by pretty much everybody except a few leftist basement-dwellers, Lenin is still read and taught throughout the world. Nothing edgy in reading Lenin.

Edgy kids on the internet worship other psychopaths like Pol Pot or Hoxha.