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This essay, part of a roundtable celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Charles V. Carnegie's Postnationalism Prefigured (2002), explores the theoretical effects of Carnegie's insistence that we release ourselves from the thrall of liberal Western sovereignty. It addresses Carnegie's prescient interventions in relation to three canards of political philosophy—race-based notions of belonging, the centrality of secularism to modern notions of political community, and particular discourses of autonomy and self-determination. The author argues that what Carnegie shows us is that the modernity of control and containment is continually one or two steps behind the countermodernity of subalterns, and that autonomy is rooted not in the race-nation-territory triad but in the everyday movements within, across, and beyond it.

Activists have long justified their egalitarian organizational forms in prefigurative terms. Making decisions by consensus, decentralizing organization, and rotating leadership serves to model the radically democratic society that activists hope to bring into being. Our comparison of consensus-based decision-making in three historical periods, however, shows that activists have understood the purposes of prefiguration in very different ways. Whereas radical pacifists in the 1940s saw their cooperative organizations as sustaining movement stalwarts in a period of political repression, new left activists in the 1960s imagined that their radically democratic practices would be adopted by ever-widening circles. Along with the political conditions in which they have operated, activists' distinctive understandings of equality have also shaped the way they have made decisions. Our interviews with 30 leftist activists today reveal a view of decision-making as a place to work through inequalities that are informal, unacknowledged, and pervasive. ; peerReviewed ; publishedVersion

Theories and concepts for understanding the political logic of social movements' everyday activities, particularly those which relate directly to political goals, have been increasingly important since the late 1970s. The notion of 'prefigurative politics' is becoming established in this debate and refers to scenarios where protesters express the political 'ends' of their actions through their 'means', or where they create experimental or 'alternative' social arrangements or institutions. Both meanings share the idea that prefiguration anticipates or partially actualises goals sought by movements. This article uses narratives and observations gathered in social movement 'free spaces', autonomous social centres in Barcelona, to evaluate, critique and rearticulate the concept. Participants' attention to the 'means' through which protest is carried out and emphasis on projects such as experimentation with alternative social and organisational forms suggest they engage in prefigurative politics. However, the article uses these examples to dispute the key ways through which prefiguration has been defined, arguing that it can better be deployed in referring to the relations, and tensions, between a set of political priorities. Understood as such, prefigurative politics combines five processes: collective experimentation, the imagining, production and circulation of political meanings, the creating of new and future-oriented social norms or 'conduct', their consolidation in movement infrastructure, and the diffusion and contamination of ideas, messages and goals to wider networks and constituencies. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

The concept of prefiguration is discussed in the context of the potential, arguably imperative emergence of a global subject of sufficient power to overcome the global rule of capital, thereby opening a path to an ecosocialist transition to a global solar commons, terminating the political economy of capitalism on our planet. Prefigurative social formations and struggles are discussed, particularly in the global South, along with the potential role of ecosocialist parties that would coordinate the emergence of a global Subject.