WORLD WORLDWIDE NEW ZEALAND - news journal UPDATE - (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Prefigurative Freedom: Building the New World in the Shell of the Old (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 One of the most distinctive and enduring contributions of anarchist political theory is the concept of prefiguration, or the insistence that the means and ends of revolutionary activity must be consistent with each other. A movement that aims to create a free society must itself be organised on free principles. A politics that aspires to mutual aid and voluntary association must practise mutual aid and voluntary association in its own structures. You cannot build freedom through domination.

This stands in stark contrast to the Leninist conception of revolutionary organisation, which insisted that the exigencies of revolutionary struggle required centralised, hierarchical, disciplined organisation under the authority of a vanguard party. The party would lead the class, the class would seize the state, the state would direct the construction of socialism, and, eventually, when the conditions were right, the state would wither away and communism would emerge. Anarchists have consistently argued that this is a fantasy, that hierarchical organisations do not wither away, that centralised power does not dissolve of its own accord, and that the habits of command and obedience developed in the period of revolutionary organisation become the habits of the revolutionary state, and then the postrevolutionary state, indefinitely.
The prefigurative principle is also a claim about the relationship between freedom and practice. Freedom is not only a destination to be achieved at the end of the revolutionary process, it is something that must be lived and practised now, in the present, in every organisation and relationship we build. The free association, the workers' council, the affinity group, the popular assembly, these are not just means to a free society, they are already, in however partial and embryonic a form, the practice of freedom. They develop in participants the capacities, habits, and values that a free society requires of self-governance, collective deliberation, mutual accountability, and trust.
This has practical implications for how anarcho-communists think about organising. It means a persistent suspicion of bureaucracy, of leadership cults, of the tendency for revolutionary organisations to reproduce internally the hierarchical structures they oppose externally. It means a commitment to rotating responsibilities, to developing the skills and confidence of all members rather than concentrating expertise in a few, to making decisions through processes that everyone can participate in. It means taking seriously the ways in which gender, race, and other axes of oppression can reproduce themselves within organisations that officially reject them, attending to who speaks, who is heard, who gets to set the agenda, whose concerns are treated as urgent and whose are deferred.
Prefigurative politics is not always comfortable. It requires constant attention to the gap between declared values and actual practices. It requires a willingness to be criticised by comrades and to take that criticism seriously. It can be slow, because genuine collective deliberation takes longer than a central committee issuing directives. But this slowness is, in a sense, the point. Learning to govern ourselves freely and collectively is not something that can be rushed or skipped. It is the substance of the revolution, not a detour on the way to it.

https://thepolarblast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/to-be-free-together.pd
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Link: (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Prefigurative Freedom: Building the New World in the Shell of the Old (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca