The boundary between a subculture and a Prefigurative political movement can sometimes be blurry.
Current discussion of Prefigurative politics has been rooted in the experience
of U.S. movements in the 1960s.
Yet Prefigurative impulses did not merely produce
the flights of utopian fantasy seen at the counter-cultural fringes.
In the recent past, a clash between“strategic” and“Prefigurative” politics could be seen in the Occupy movement.
In contrast, Prefigurative activists are often indifferent, or even antagonistic, to the attitudes of the
media and of mainstream society.
Coined by political theorist Carl Boggs and popularized by sociologist Wini Breines,
the term“Prefigurative politics” emerged out of analysis of New Left
movements in the United States.
The strong ties fostered by this Prefigurative community encouraged participants to undertake bold
and dangerous acts of civil disobedience- such as SNCC's famous sit-ins at lunch counters in the segregated South.
At the same time, she distinguishes Prefigurative action from a different type of politics-
strategic politics- that are“committed to building organization in order to achieve power so that structural changes in the political, economic and social orders might be achieved.”.