Prefigurative politics are modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by a group. In practice, they involve building a new society "within the shell of the old" by living out the values and social structures the group desires for the future.

According to Carl Boggs, who coined the term, prefigurative politics aims to embody "within the ongoing political practice of a movement [...] those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal," thus aligning the means and the ends of social change. Prefigurative politics are sometimes justified based on the premise that the ends a social movement can achieve are "fundamentally shaped by the means it employs." Prefigurativism is the attempt to enact prefigurative politics.

Boggs wrote about prefiguration in the context of the revolutionary movements in Russia, Italy, Spain, and the US New Left. In 1979 Sheila Rowbotham applied the concept to the London Free School, which she claimed prefigured the politics of the early libertarians of the early 1970s. In the following year Wini Breines, the then-professor of sociology and women's studies in Northeastern University, applied the concept to the US Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1984, John L. Hammond applied the concept to the Portuguese Revolution.

The politics of prefiguration rejected the centrism and vanguardism of many of the groups and political parties of the 1960s. It is both a politics of creation, and one of breaking with hierarchy. Breines wrote:

The term prefigurative politics [...] may be recognized in counter institutions, demonstrations and the attempt to embody personal and anti-hierarchical values in politics. Participatory democracy was central to prefigurative politics. [...] 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.

For Breines, "prefigurative politics" centers on "participatory democracy", understood as an ongoing opposition to hierarchical and centralized organization that requires a movement that develops and establishes relationships and political forms that "prefigure" the egalitarian and democratic society that it seeks to create. Furthermore, she sees prefigurative politics as strictly connected to the notion of community, referring to it as a network of relationships that are more direct, more personal, and more total than the formal, abstract and instrumental relationships that are embedded in contemporary state and society.

Anarchists around the turn of the twentieth century clearly embraced the principle that the means used to achieve any end must be consistent with that end, though they apparently did not use the term "prefiguration". For example, James Guillaume, a comrade of Mikhail Bakunin, wrote, "How could one want an equalitarian and free society to issue from authoritarian organisation? It is impossible."

One of the greatest examples during the 20th century in this regard is the comunismo libertario (libertarian communism) society organized by anarcho-syndicalists such as the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), or in English the National Confederation of Labour, for a few months during the Spanish Civil War. Workers took collective control of the means of production on a decentralized level and used mass-self communication as a counter-power in order to give useful information on a wide range of options, from vegetarian cooking to the treatment of sexually transmitted infections.^{[citation needed]}