Prefigurative politics are the modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the group.

In addition, the Division welcomes practitioner perspectives on the intersection between cultural studies, political economy, and prefigurative media politics.

Prefigurativism is the attempt to enact prefigurative politics.

Participatory democracy was central to prefigurative politics.

She wrote: "The term prefigurative politics .

The term "prefigurative politics" was first used by Wini Breines specifically with reference to the new left movements of the 1960s.

He advocates economic localisation in the same vein as many in the Green movement, although only as a prefigurative step rather than an end in itself.

When Gandhi said that "the means may be likened to the seed, the end to a tree," he expressed the philosophical kernel of what some refer to as prefigurative politics.

If "everything has prefigurative potential", Kovel notes that forms of potential ecological production will be "scattered", and thus suggests that "the task is to free them and connect them".

If a group is aiming to eliminate class distinctions, prefigurative politics demands that there be no class distinctions within that group, nor should that group's actions reinforce classism.

It was in the localities that the war stimulated innovation in classroom practice, but such innovation was usually makeshift, not prefigurative, and much of it was for the duration only.

Anthropologist David Graeber in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology described the prefigurative politics of those at the 1999 Seattle WTO protest:

Practically, eco-socialists have generated various strategies to mobilise action on an internationalist basis, developing networks of grassroots individuals and groups that can radically transform society through nonviolent "prefigurative projects" for a post-capitalist, post-statist world.

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."

The same principle applies to hierarchy: if a group is fighting to abolish some or all forms of hierarchy in larger society, prefigurative politics demands they individually and as a group adhere as closely to that goal as possible.

These prefigurative steps go "beyond the market and the state" and base production on the enhancement of use values, leading to the internationalization of resistance communities in an 'Eco-socialist Party' or network of grassroots groups focused on non-violent, radical social transformation.

Graeber has argued that the Occupy Wall Street movement's lack of recognition of the legitimacy of either existing political institutions or the legal structure, its embrace of non-hierarchical consensus decision-making and of prefigurative politics make it a fundamentally anarchist project.

A distinctly postanarchist conception of politics can be "understood in terms of an ongoing project of autonomy and a pluralization of insurrectional spaces and desires", exemplifying "prefigurative practices, which seek to realize alternatives to capitalism and statism within the current order".

David Graeber has argued that the Occupy movement, in its anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian consensus-based politics, its refusal to accept the legitimacy of the existing legal and political order, and its embrace of prefigurative politics, has roots in an anarchist political tradition.

For Kovel, the main prefigurative steps "are that people ruthlessly criticize the capitalist system... and that they include in this a consistent attack on the widespread belief that there can be no alternative to it", which will then "deligitimate the system and release people into struggle".

During the eighties, anti-authoritarian socialists in the United Kingdom and New Zealand criticised the rigid and determinist view of popular culture deployed within the Frankfurt School theories of capitalist culture, which seemed to preclude any prefigurative role for social critique within such work.

The nub of this criticism is that such views give rise to a kind of political paralysis: everything must wait until the revolutionary moment in which the production relations are transformed; until then labour must play a purely oppositional role, a role which Precludes struggle of a 'prefigurative' kind.