You you have an example of such theory? To me that smells like something Marxists would falsely claim to discredit the idea.

I don’t read theory about prefigurative politics so no. I don’t read much Marxist theory either and for sure not on praxis, which doesn’t seem to be doing much better than prefigurative politics.

Nonetheless, I encounter a lot of people using the word in their papers, events, artworks or similar stuff and that’s where I see the term used, rather than on theory.

The slogan “building the new in the shell of the old” goes directly back to the syndicalists of the IWW, who originally used it to describe concrete action in the workplace to establish horizontal decision making structures etc. so that such worker owned cooperatives could prefigurate envisioned changes in larger society.

Yeah, and in a way it didn’t work. The cooperative movement never had the muscles to establish itself as a new paradigm. I say that as somebody working in cooperatives and doing consultancy for cooperatives. Cooperatives are bubbles of peace in a storm, but they won’t stop the storm. They are not different than a TAZ in this sense, with the difference that the cooperative movement is a lot more aware of material conditions and the fact that by itself it will never be able to become the hegemonic form of production.