Whether violence is effective or counterproductive can’t just be assumed ideologically, it has to be assessed based on the situation. The bulk of human history has involved violent state repression, that the perpetrators have frequently gotten away with (and made bank off of).

Sure, but the bulk of human history was not ideologically anarchist. I.e. the people were not self-consciously trying to avoid hierarchies. If they didn’t have any, it was just the way things evolved, but they weren’t conscious about rejecting them actively.

If we are in a position where, because of the lack of prefiguration, the state is able to use violence with impunity and then simply lie or blame the victims, then it follows that the state can use violence to prevent prefiguration from occurring, to the extent that it sees it as a threat to its power. It’s a bit of a Catch-22.

In the 20th century, the Marxist-Leninist experiments sucked out all the oxygen from the room by turning all socialist momentum towards those failed projects which just became capitalist again. The world is not the same anymore and a lot of lessons have been learnt and as the empire hegemony weakens and collapses through its own contradictions, there will be space for prefiguration to be practiced and grow. You can’t just take the last 100 of the US at the height of its power and posit that this is how the world will always play out.

Anyway, the best part of prefiguration is that it allows people to do it based on their appetite for risk. What we’re doing right now is a form prefiguration. Supporting piracy, supporting distributed social media, rejecting VC-based capitalism and so on. Not everything can be solved by violence and we can and should flow around it.