In the wake of surges of class struggles and uprisings around the world many radicals and revolutionaries think through what ideas and strategies are needed to realize a world without exploitation and oppression. Anarchism, the close cousin to revolutionary Marxism, has both broad appeal and many divergent political tendencies. This talk will critically engage with some of the most popular and advanced of those tendencies—prefigurative politics and insurrectionary syndicalism—and offer a Marxist assessment of the similarities and concrete limits of these politics. The attempt to remake the world will always put us into contest with the state and erect unavoidable barriers we cannot simply “prefigure away.” We argue that the revolutionary Marxist conception of the state and how to destroy it is the strategy workers must take up to win their liberation.