Interstitial revolution is a theoretical means of societal transformation through progressively and strategically enlarging spaces of social empowerment. Interstitial revolution (or transformation) builds on the concept of prefigurative politics which has a long history in anti-capitalist thinking, going back nearly two hundred years in the anarchist tradition. Prefigurativism is neatly summed up by the early twentieth century Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World which declared: "By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the old."[1]
This has classically been the approach recommended by several theorists of social anarchism, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Gustav Landauer, Paul Goodman, and Murray Bookchin. In recent years, prominent analytical Marxists (including John Holloway[2] and Erik Olin Wright[3]) have called attention to the lack of strategy for greater systemic change within prefigurativism and have attempted to construct models of societal transformation utilizing interstitial devices as an alternative to the traditional Marxist theory of revolution.