A - I n f o s

a multi-lingual news service by, for, and about anarchists **
News in all languages
Last 40 posts (Homepage) Last two weeks' posts Our archives of old posts

The last 100 posts, according to language
Greek_ 中文 Chinese_ Castellano_ Catalan_ Deutsch_ Nederlands_ English_ Français_ Italiano_ Polski_ Português_ Russkyi_ Suomi_ Svenska_ Türkçe_ _The.Supplement

The First Few Lines of The Last 10 posts in:
Castellano_ Deutsch_ Nederlands_ English_ Français_ Italiano_ Polski_ Português_ Russkyi_ Suomi_ Svenska_ Türkçe_
First few lines of all posts of last 24 hours | of past 30 days | of 2002 | of 2003 | of 2004 | of 2005 | of 2006 | of 2007 | of 2008 | of 2009 | of 2010 | of 2011 | of 2012 | of 2013 | of 2014 | of 2015 | of 2016 | of 2017 | of 2018 | of 2019 | of 2020 | of 2021 | of 2022 | of 2023 | of 2024 | of 2025

Syndication Of A-Infos - including RDF - How to Syndicate A-Infos
Subscribe to the a-infos newsgroups

(en) Spaine, LISA, Regeneracion: Revolutionary Judo - Reflections on Understanding the Especifist Strategy, the Construction of Popular Power, and Revolutionary Gymnastics (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Date Thu, 10 Apr 2025 09:34:54 +0300


Warning: This text is NOT directed at the libertarian movement in its loosest sense. Those who have not made a deep and honest assessment or, after some analysis, have concluded that nothing in their strategy should be revised, WILL NOT FIND ANY MESSAGE FOR THEM HERE. ---- For those who profess such unwavering faith based on the most fundamentalist interpretations of The Idea, or for those whose "particular" experience has not brought them the bitter taste of another defeat and who feel complete, satiated, and confirmed by the impact of their political action, THIS ARTICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.

Here I write for my comrades, those who question themselves to the core, those who feel that anarchism is committed to the most radical self-criticism and who wholeheartedly pursue it, eschewing imposture, because they want to change the world. I write for those I've been fortunate enough to meet, with whom I advance in the goal of building a strategic Anarchism for a mass socialist revolution.

Specifism and Platformism are part of a current of anarchism that, in its most basic expression, represents a significant advance in the libertarian tradition compared to other strategic currents. Refusing to accept the typical appeal to supposedly unequivocal and unquestionable libertarian principles, which is nothing more than the threat of a withdrawal of the "card," the comrades who gather around this tendency, which we will call revolutionary organized anarchism , have discussed several tendentious dogmas.

My comrades have refused to accept that the only libertarian militant practice compatible with anarchist values is that carried out individually and at the mass level. In response to this imposition, they have asserted that the creation of ideological organizations to intervene in social processes and build strategic and action unity is not only more practical and useful for a mass emancipatory project, but is also more consistent with libertarian principles because it facilitates processes of joint reflection and self-criticism.

What seems obvious, in the libertarian movement, represents a true leap forward. In my opinion, my comrades in Madrid, Catalonia, the rest of the Spanish regions, and internationally have been and are very brave to face their contradictions and pursue them to the end. When breaking with common sense and tradition, in its worst sense, means putting your social spaces and your closest environment at risk, the courage is doubled.

Now, once that first question has been established and it has been established that the Specific Organization and Dual Militancy are coherent and strategically more effective than other forms of militancy, it is time to begin answering the key question: What is the objective or task that such an organization seeks to accomplish? In other words: what do concepts such as Popular Power, Insurrectional General Strike , or the accumulation of social force really mean? These questions are essential because their answers determine both the way in which the specific organization is constructed and its relationship with the different spaces of tendencies and masses.

Obviously, we cannot and do not intend to answer all of these questions unequivocally in this article, but I will try to put in writing some questions that I think are important not to forget or put off for too long.

Revolutionary Specific Gymnastics?

The concept of "revolutionary gymnastics," attributed to García Oliver during the pistolero era, can be understood as the implementation of a tactic whose main objective is to generate different situations in which revolutionaries could learn, in and through practice, lessons that would serve them once a broader revolutionary process began.

The goal was to create groups capable of arming themselves, combating the enemy, fostering self-organization processes for the working class, and developing political developments. It should be noted that it was not only intended to serve as a training ground for the working class and its most militant members; it also sought to advance the construction of self-defense structures. As I will use this concept only for its illustrative potential, in the most explicit sense of the term, I apologize in advance for having simplified and summarized it in this way.

For the purpose of this article, we aim to consider what the Revolutionary Gymnastics of Especifista Organizations might be today and in our immediate context, and compare it with their objectives to determine whether or not they are fulfilling their function, or even whether their function is clear. My hypothesis, as will be revealed, is that there are disparate interpretations of key concepts and ideas given that the development of Especifista strategy is still, at least in Spain, very young. The organizational tactic, Especifismo, has taken center stage and, for the moment, has obscured the comprehensive development of a revolutionary mass strategy.

In many texts we have said, in various ways, that the tasks of Specific Organizations in mass movements and social struggles were to combat bureaucracies, strengthen spaces for class self-organization, provide strategic vision and systemic analysis or, in a much more poetic and also vaguer way, to accumulate Social Force , in a cumulative process that we call People's Power and that, hypothetically, would lead us to build the conditions that make it possible to confront the bourgeoisie in a process of Insurrectional General Strike , among others.

These interventions can be understood as an end in themselves, but we can and should undoubtedly also conceive them as part of a Revolutionary Gymnastics project that allows us to develop the necessary experiences to address an acute process of class struggle. We would be talking about two subjects who would be trained in these processes: the masses and the revolutionary militants of the Specific Organizations. We must reinforce and point out immediately that this "social intervention" has as one of its main objectives to serve the libertarian revolutionary organization and its militants as a space for training and growth. This connection with social reality, beyond all theorization and our ghettos, is what allows us to grow alongside the broader spaces of struggle.

Revolutionary fitness: the limits of stage-based and cumulative thinking

We have been saying that Specific Revolutionary Organizations intervene in social processes to promote the accumulation of social power in a project of People's Power . However, the problem is that this statement is highly ambiguous and can be understood in various ways or lead us to significant conceptual errors with disastrous political consequences.

The most basic and also most common way of thinking about the accumulation of social force ( represented in graph 1 ) is to think that through participation in different struggles, we can achieve a progressive growth in the strength of the working class as a whole, until we equal or surpass the forces of our class enemies: the bourgeoisie and its repressive forces.

This way of imagining the process of People's Power has several risks that I will address below:

The possibility of growth is directly related to the revolutionary or conciliatory character of the mass grouping.
The enemy will not allow a force whose objective is to confront and subdue it to grow. We have seen on a thousand and one occasions, and we will see it again if we do not take measures, that the projects allowed to develop and grow within this system are the harmless ones, and that any project with a certain capacity to challenge is quickly repressed or diverted. This does not mean in the least that we cannot and should not fight for the growth of mass organizations. What is firmly stated is that quantitative growth does not necessarily imply qualitative growth in terms of Social Strength or Popular Power .

Historically, we have clear examples of the growth of workers' organizations that were either permitted by the bourgeoisie due to their conciliatory and reformist nature, or that, at a crucial moment, lacking a developed plan, decided to try to conserve their accumulated strength. As we can see in Figure 2 , it's of no use to accumulate forces to build a unit that is unwilling to fight or doesn't know how to do so.

We must challenge the stage-based and evolutionary approaches. Simple cumulative thinking and growth metaphors can prevent us from constructing precise analyses and producing truly effective plans. Obviously, organizations lack a natural essence, and their projection-conservative, conciliatory, or revolutionary-will depend on their composition and internal balance of forces.

Growth is rarely cumulative in a unidirectional sense.
Anarchism has tended to be moved and deeply involved in various social struggles and protest movements, but an endemic lack of a strategic plan and an adequate Theory of Social Reproduction has led us to experience ebbs and flows as genuine personal tragedies and unexpected accidents. Militant depression and burnout are constant, and, as we see in Figure 3, it's quite normal for a temporary rise to be followed by a decline. If we don't have a well-developed definition of our strategy, People's Power won't be able to save us from falling into the swamp of sadness when we see much of what we've built crumble and much of what we've mobilized go astray.

We must develop a holistic Revolutionary Theory that attempts to anticipate , as far as possible, all possible scenarios. This doesn't mean clinging to an unquestionable and rigid model, but rather equipping ourselves with tools for focus. In the heat of battle, profound reflection cannot be constructed, and history cannot find us once again disarmed of theory.

Not all social bodies are identical.
Lacking a well-developed Theory of Social Reproduction , it's easy to construct simplistic characterizations and be dominated by quantitative thinking. A revolutionary organization capable of detecting bureaucratic agents seeking to divert social power and authoritarian projects aiming to build a base of operations based on class conflicts must be able to differentiate between the different active subjects within the class as a whole. Who are the most revolutionary and combative? Who are the most involved? Who can we rely on and who should we rely on?

As we see in Figure 4, somewhat grotesquely, it is not about promoting generalized growth, but rather those parts of the working class that are most advanced, most involved, and have the greatest revolutionary potential.

We need to equip ourselves with the most developed Theory of Social Reproduction possible and activate a fractionalist filter . A paternalistic and prudish conception of society is as little useful to emancipatory goals as sectarianism and purism.

Factionalism should also be applied to oneself
If we truly believe that the Libertarian Revolutionary Organization is necessary to support and defend mass revolutionary processes, we must accept that its qualitative and quantitative growth is a priority. It should be at least as important as the growth of spaces for class self-organization and its most advanced fractions.

Let's break with our complexes and assume that times of low social conflict are the appropriate framework for developing Specific Organization, the Theory of Social Reproduction, and Revolutionary Theory. Around us, we have examples of organizations that confuse organizational growth with the growth of broader spaces and end up building themselves without unity and losing militants along the way, who abandon the organization to focus on broader spaces of struggle because they don't have this point clearly in mind.

As we see in graph 5 , if class spaces grow and the organization stagnates, its relative size becomes more acute, turning the Specific Organization into an insignificant force when acute processes of class struggle open up.

The enemy must be included in our analysis
I am concerned to see that many theoretical articulations of Popular Power are not supported by a Theory of Social Reproduction that places periods of capitalist crisis at the center of analysis . This is a mistake that can lead us to construct ourselves in an unstrategic way. Failing to consider the problem of the forces in conflict in a radically relational or dialectical way is one of the worst flaws a strategy that claims to be revolutionary can have. The possibility of attacking the enemy, as shown in Figure 6 , is not provided by the growth of our mass, but also, and primarily, by the weakening of rival forces.

From a Gramscian perspective, " organic crises " involve understanding the possibility of the working class's strength growing through the fragmentation of the bourgeoisie's forces. The loss of legitimacy of the capitalist system and bourgeois democracy, the inability to integrate broad masses of workers into a welfare system, and the impossibility of fulfilling the promises of the capitalist dream mean that thousands of people can abruptly change sides if the right intervention is made. This is where one of the fundamental tasks of any revolutionary project comes in: building class hegemony involves integrating the demands of the working classes into those of the class fractions that truly constitute us as a power.

The Theory of Social Reproduction we must adopt must be capable of producing the most accurate characterizations of social cycles possible . The terminology coined by Lazzarato, "terminal crisis," very much in vogue within the libertarian movement, has the major problem that it can lead us to believe that we will simply have to wait for capitalism to collapse on its own. On the contrary, concepts such as the "Era of Crisis, Wars, and Revolutions" help us understand that we may be entering a period where capitalist crises will become increasingly acute, affect larger sectors of the population, last longer, be more frequent, and prevent a full recovery of economic systems.

A linear and traditional temporal thought is a thought incapable of addressing revolutionary processes
All biographical accounts of revolutionaries and witnesses to major historical conflicts emphasize how time is distorted and accelerated during periods of social upheaval. Social time is a relative time conditioned by the density of social phenomena. In times of social peace, everything seems static, change seems so distant that it begins to seem utopian, history slows down, and prophets of defeat proclaim the end of history (and the consequent death of the proletariat). But when the first conflicts begin to occur, time changes, it accelerates, and the Mad Hatter enters the scene. So much happens in such a short time; there are so many inputs, so much life, so much energy, that the perception of time is logically altered. This necessarily implies three things:

Windows of opportunity: revolutionary processes open and close.
Thinking based on cumulative growth can lead to conservative attitudes.
Any revolutionary organization that does not include this issue in its Revolutionary Theory is doomed to be unable to react quickly when time accelerates .
In Figure 7, I attempt to illustrate these issues. The revolutionary organization (indicated in red) fails to seize the moment, especially if it lacks the strength and scale to be able to have an impact on the entire working class (represented in green). Meanwhile, comrades who pursue strategies with a unidirectional, cumulative vision (represented in black) tend to be conservative and try to halt or avoid the struggle because they fear that everything they have built will collapse if they are defeated. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie has time to regroup, and once it regains power, it will soon go on the offensive and dismantle any project of class organization.

Revolutionary Judo

At this point, it might seem that all these dangers pointed out in the approaches that place the growth of Social Force at the center of the revolutionary mass strategy can be counteracted by implementing a certain level of attention to possible deviations. If this has been understood, I have explained myself quite poorly. The Revolutionary Organization is built in a certain way, and in order to assume certain tasks, all "revolutionary gymnastics" must be aimed at preparing us for a specific type of situation. Long-distance athletes, gymnasts, and boxers do not train in the same way, because the activity they face is not the same.

I don't know if this is the best possible example, but to follow the metaphor to the end, I thought perhaps judo and its modern variants are the martial arts that best serve to explain the proposal we are defending here. This Japanese martial art and its various contemporary variations focus their training and development on a comprehensive understanding of the body (one's own and one's opponent's), strength, and timing . The inevitable contact between the two contenders has the main objective of detecting our opponent's intentions through the different pressure changes in the grips, with the goal of being able to take advantage of, enhance, and apply our own and the opponent's strength in a specific direction. Throws, locks, strikes, and strangulations are only possible through the precise application of force at specific times, in specific areas, and in specific directions. End of metaphor.

The Revolutionary Gymnastics of Libertarian Revolutionary Organizations that wish to play a productive role in supporting, developing, and defending revolutionary processes must be built to detect the slightest shifts in social forces and tensions and immediately redirect all their forces toward them. This approach is incompatible with a closed, cumulative idea of class-building processes.

As part of the social body of the working class, Specific Organizations must support processes of popular struggle and self-defense, self-management, and direct action, and enhance analytical and strategic capacities by supporting the most advanced sectors and confronting bureaucratic and authoritarian deviations. Strengthen the working class as a whole while strengthening the revolutionary organization without expecting the mechanical conclusion of victory from this process of accumulation of forces, but always keeping our eyes on the certainty that the constitution of a Dual Power , of a class power capable of confronting the power of the bourgeoisie, will inevitably open a conflict that cannot remain unresolved.

We must build ourselves to detect energy flows, tensions, and forces in growth or decline. We must work to be able to detect the accumulation of antagonistic capital, social tension, the growth of class consciousness, and the resulting acceleration of social time. We must prepare ourselves to be able to identify forces, characterize the different agents, and direct our own strength and that of the class as a whole toward actions that allow us to win. We must become aware of the changing rhythms and speeds inherent in social dynamics and be prepared to accelerate when our analyses suggest it and not be blocked when we need to go all out. We must educate ourselves and grow in the art of insurrection.

Miguel Brea, Liza activist

https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/03/12/judo-revolucionario/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en
A-Infos Information Center