A-Infos (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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