Resisting Capitalism through the Capitalist State: Prefigurative Politics as a Strategy

Prefigurative organisations that practice democratic, community-oriented and environmentally sustainable ways of organising are a crucial component of any political strategy that aims to transcend capitalism. However, since capitalism is the dominant economic system, prefigurative initiatives often remain limited to marginal spaces of the economy and society and are vulnerable to the encroachment of capitalist values, practices and logics. Therefore, prefigurative practices face a central problem: how to move beyond capitalism from within capitalism? This article presents one potential answer: prefigurative initiatives should strategically use the capitalist state to advance their aims and resist capitalist encroachment, thereby building futures beyond capitalism from inside of capitalism. The argument draws on a case study of the Scottish social enterprise to demonstrate how this can be done in practice. The article theorises three interrelated yet distinct strategies of resistance: a strategy of co-production , a strategy of institutionalisation and a strategy of withdrawal , on which prefigurative initiatives can draw when strategically interacting with the capitalist state. This article goes beyond anarchist and autonomist understandings of prefiguration and contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that highlights the potential of mobilising the resources of the capitalist state for emancipatory ends.