A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion: Louise Michel has risen again By Liza (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Broken Time and Revolutionary Strategy: Toward a Libertarian 
Revolutionary Theory Capable of Overcoming Metaphors of Accumulation 
---- Louise Michel has risen again, and the black flags in the wind once 
again signal a storm warning. Louise Michel has risen again, bringing 
the good news once again. We have not desecrated her grave to toss it 
around like a puppet. She is not the protagonist of an adolescent 
pantomime. She is Louise Michel herself in the flesh. On the front 
lines. At the foot of the barricades. She has risen again along with the 
social revolution. She already warned: "I belong entirely to the social 
revolution." One hundred and twenty years after her death, Louise Michel 
has returned from the dead, she has abandoned the peace of the earth 
because the revolution has returned.

The End of the End of History

Ernest Mandel, a Marxist economist and Trotskyist leader of the Fourth 
International, developed the theory of the "long waves" of capitalism, 
influenced by Nikolai Kondratiev. Mandel argued that capitalism does not 
progress linearly, but rather through long cycles of growth and 
stagnation, which can last several decades. These cycles are affected by 
factors such as technological innovation, class struggle, geopolitical 
conditions, and the rate of profit.

Mandel identified a "long wave of stability" that followed World War II 
and extended into the 1970s. During this time, capitalism enjoyed 
sustained growth, low unemployment, and increased social welfare in 
developed countries, facilitating the integration of the middle classes 
and deproletarianization. This growth was driven by post-war 
reconstruction, the expansion of the welfare state, and a favorable 
geopolitical context.

However, Mandel warned that this stability would not last. In the early 
1970s, capitalism entered a new phase of crisis, marked by the collapse 
of the Bretton Woods system and the 1973 oil crisis, which led to 
stagflation. This marked the end of the "long wave of stability" and the 
beginning of a phase of instability, manifested in class conflicts such 
as the French May of '68 and the Prague Spring.

Although these critical movements of workers' struggle and 
self-organization were defeated or derailed, it would be foolish to 
claim that the capitalist system was able to fully recover and achieve 
the same level of stability as in the postwar years. The internal 
contradictions it continued to generate allow us to speak of a new 
period of restoration, never complete, which only achieved a certain 
level of stabilization through the neoliberal counter-reform of Margaret 
Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, 
and the beginning of neoliberalism. None of this could have been 
achieved without the use of force and dirty war, a full-fledged 
counterrevolution that achieved widespread de-ideologization, the 
implantation of a consumer subjectivity, and the fracturing of the 
working class domestically and globally.

The success of the neoliberal offensive, which we now see reaching its 
limits, was an ideological and material clamp that tightened the grip on 
class conflict. The financial sector became a central driver of the 
global economy, with exponential growth in capital markets, financial 
derivatives, and credit. This generated a period of economic growth, but 
also of growing inequality and financial fragility. Some theorists, such 
as David Harvey, argue that the period 1973-2008 was not a long wave of 
stability, but rather a phase of capitalist restructuring based on 
financialization and globalization. Neoliberalism did not resolve the 
fundamental contradictions of capitalism, but rather postponed them 
through debt and financial expansion.

The historic defeat of the proletariat was finally confirmed for those 
who still harbored some hope in the socialist bloc with the fall of the 
Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR, and the definitive establishment 
of state capitalism in China. The triumphalism of the neoliberal model 
was condensed in the work of American political scientist Fukuyama, who 
jubilantly announced "the end of history." From a deeply Eurocentric 
position and completely disarmed at the theoretical and strategic level, 
the far left began its long exodus through the desert of impotence. 
Embracing the ideas of its enemy and imbued with the race to overthrow 
more metanarratives, it accepted part of Fukuyama's ideology as true.

This shift has led to a crisis on the left, which in many cases has 
abandoned the idea of a systemic alternative to capitalism. Instead of 
seeking to overcome it, it has focused on mitigating its negative 
effects through redistributive policies and regulations, attempting to 
construct a broader subject with the idea of multitude or citizenship, 
or simply theorizing flight or alternative islands, always temporary, as 
eternal lines of flight. Revolution was no longer possible, an idea 
embraced even by the Mandelists themselves. It was in this defeatist and 
depressive climate of the end of history and the impossibility of 
revolution that Louise Michel's corpse decomposed, along with the 
aspirations of the entire working class.

But this defeatist tendency plunged the capitalist system itself into 
crisis in 2008. The bursting of the bubble marked the end of this phase 
of capitalist restructuring in response to the crisis of the 1970s and 
ushered in a new period of uncertainty and structural crisis in global 
capitalism. An international wave of mobilizations and protests, which 
only working-class deniers dare to fragment and theorize as isolated 
phenomena, shook the foundations of this system. Although they were 
defeated or diverted, lacking experience and with political proposals 
constructed from despair, they opened before our eyes a new period of 
class struggle.

What seemed impossible just a few years ago now seems within our grasp. 
Speaking of revolutionary processes and revolution from the everyday 
reality of the defeat in which we have been stranded seems less and less 
anachronistic and illusory. History is rolling again, and through the 
cracks of stagnant time, which is fracturing and beginning to regain 
rhythm, we can hear the threats Michel herself made to the bourgeois 
criminal court that suppressed the commune's rebellion with blood and fire.

One of the few advantages, a terrible advantage, that our position as 
revolutionary militants has is that when events precipitate and crises 
deepen and spread, there is no way to hide their presence or minimize 
their impact. Evictions, layoffs, food lines, mobilizations, and 
discontent take center stage, and little can be done to hide so much 
antagonistic energy, so much unrest. The aspirations of the middle 
classes to live comfortably are threatened, if not outright destroyed. 
Any doubt about one's position in this productive system is drastically 
answered. Thousands of lives tumble over the vertiginous edges of 
democracy at the service of the elites. We have seen it and we will see 
it again.

We stated elsewhere that our revolutionary perspective is not based on 
any dogma of faith 
(https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/05/29/poder-popular-y-anarquismo-especifista/). 
Both historical and structural analyses in every sense (economics, 
ecology, sociology, etc.) indicate that maintaining the status quo and 
social peace is increasingly precarious and that the near future holds 
profound social crises.

Cumulative metaphors in emancipatory strategic approaches

The way we construct our strategic positions is limited by language 
itself. To communicate our ideas, we must overlap definitions, construct 
images, and construct metaphors. As Lakoff and Johnson point out in 
Metaphors for Everyday Life,

Metaphor permeates everyday life, not only language, but also thought 
and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think 
and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

This process involves forcing reality into concepts and images that we 
then reconstruct dialogically, enabling communication but also 
conditioning our perception and actions, influenced by the metaphors we 
use. Understanding the metaphors that dominate our conceptions allows us 
to examine and question how they influence our approach to social 
complexity.

In the Libertarian Movement in particular, but also in many other 
sectors of the far left with emancipatory goals, the images through 
which we decode and encode our strategic plans and forecasts are 
dominated by metaphors of accumulation and hoarding, or in another 
visual sense, of expansion or liberation.

This purely cumulative approach dominated the socialist imagination and 
social movements throughout that period (1945-2008), when revolution 
seemed impossible and, according to Louise Michel, no one expected it. 
All the emancipatory proposals of that era suffer from a lack of 
conceptualization of crisis and social time because such a thing simply 
didn't seem possible.

We can see this assertion in the approaches of all currents of the 
libertarian movement: the spark that spreads and spreads the fire, the 
accumulation of Popular Power and Social Force, the liberation and 
growth of alternative spaces... our entire imagination is conditioned by 
metaphors of accumulation, and these metaphors, in turn, affect our way 
of thinking and projecting strategic proposals.

The abandonment of social time

The end of history meant a certain abandonment of the question of time. 
As history no longer advanced, it only made sense to consider time in 
relation to spatial or volume advances. While it's true that these 
conceptual devices were sometimes expanded with temporal references, the 
question of rhythms and timing was always the least clear and least 
present in the dominant metaphors of spatiality and the accumulation of 
forces, or it remained subordinated to them. We talk about building 
organizations without haste in a long-term project because time seems 
infinite and unchangeable, or we think of turbulent historical moments 
of social upheaval as propitious for influencing the objectives of 
expansion and accumulation of forces.

This doesn't lead us to understand moments of crisis as brief 
interruptions of everyday social peace, conducive to expanding our 
borders, consolidating our defenses, recruiting new troops, or gaining 
experience. Everything seems destined to focus on continuous deployment, 
not on embarking on a final battle under more favorable conditions in 
terms of force numbers. It's aimed at merely overcoming the quantitative 
and consequent surrender of the enemy's resistance.

We pretend that the decisive battle will never happen because we still 
believe capitalism is insurmountable. The risk of not anticipating 
direct and open confrontation is failing to prepare for it. Denying its 
possibility means ignoring the responsibility of strategic development. 
We understand the war of positions as separate from the war of 
movements; what's worse, the war of movements is understood as small 
advances to expand liberated spaces or accumulated forces. Any offensive 
movement is conditioned by a defensive intention, conceived and carried 
out in terms of better securing a position, and never the other way 
around. Partial victories become a sandbag that believes itself fixed on 
our last, most advanced barricade.

This is where the reformist and pact-making vision comes into its own, 
calling for calm, denouncing those who are out of control, and demanding 
respect for the negotiating tables. Be careful, though, because 
reformists aren't just those who call themselves reformers, but all 
those who, lacking a plan, end up taking conservative positions at key 
moments.

While some perspectives approach the contemplation of the temporal 
dimension in their conceptualization prospectively, they rarely manage 
to escape the logic of accumulation and overflow that will free us from 
the conflict. This approach continues to ignore the temporal problem of 
the acceleration and compression of time, and of course that of the 
final battle, which will be ridiculed for its sensationalist and epic 
nature, but which contrasts with assertions such as that of a terminal 
crisis, so popular among those who, more than messengers, can be 
considered masseurs. Waiting for an enemy as kamikaze as the one we face 
to capitulate and surrender its weapons is as reckless as it is 
unconscious. Reckless as a synonym for irresponsible. Unconscious as a 
synonym for irrational.

The crisis of capitalism's infinite resilience

The fact that we are far removed from those who continue to assert the 
impossibility of overcoming capitalism and its infinite capacity for 
resistance, like Tomas Ibañez and other post-anarchists who have 
individually and on paper overcome more than a century of workers' 
struggle, does not bring us any closer to those collapsists who 
encourage us to retreat to the countryside to build self-sufficient 
communities in the face of the imminent and abrupt fall of capitalism, 
among whom Carlos Taibo stands out in his Landauerian or Zerzanist 
drift. It seems much more accurate and politically responsible to speak 
of a revival of the era of crisis, wars, and revolutions.

The system's inability to fully recover from the latest economic crisis, 
the global Covid pandemic, which foreshadows a precarious socio-health 
balance, imperialist rearmament in the face of the dispute for global 
hegemony between China and the USA, which directly affects European 
borders, the growing climate of tension in the Middle East, Asia, 
Africa, and Latin America, the rise of the far right, the inexorable 
climate crisis, the depletion of natural resources and the energy 
crisis, forced migration, the instability of middle-class societies, and 
the widespread decline in the rate of profit are both symptoms of this 
endemic instability and factors of destabilization that feed off each other.

There is more than enough data and analysis to understand that the 
capitalist system is far from being able to generate the conditions for 
a new long wave of stability, and everything seems to indicate that we 
are going to experience a period where economic, social, health, and 
climate crises will become more frequent, longer, deeper, affect more 
strata of society, recur more frequently, and will not recover to 
previous levels. All this evidence has Louise Michel turning in her grave.

Social time is a relative time

All the accounts of the revolutionaries who have recounted their 
experiences in the processes of class struggle agree on a perception of 
time that is radically different from social time without conflict. 
Revolutionary time is a revolutionized time. We do not have a close 
experience of such depth because we have not lived through such acute 
conflict. The only thing we can try to do in an attempt to understand 
the experience of the revolutionaries is, through a process of 
inference, to multiply our own experience in processes of social 
conflict by a thousand. The 15M movement was perhaps the period of 
greatest upheaval in recent years; obviously, it is light years away 
from other historical moments of class struggle, but those of us who 
actively participated in it are fully aware of what it did to our 
calendars and clocks, of how it distorted social time by reordering 
priorities and urgencies.

The accumulation of social mass and political energy that overflowed 
into the squares and neighborhoods of the Spanish state precipitated the 
acceleration of social time. Those months witnessed the political 
activity of previous decades. Political meetings, assemblies, meetings, 
working groups, workshops, actions, demonstrations, communications... a 
frenetic activity took hold of social movements and political 
organizations. It seemed impossible to keep up with everything; many of 
us felt we were arriving late and weak at key moments. Only from here 
can we attempt to imagine what greater conflict, open class struggle, or 
a revolutionary process will do to the minute hand. We are speaking 
directly of temporal leaps, of drastic changes in the subjectivity of 
the masses, in political experience, in the level of antagonism and 
awareness. Social time is a relative time because it accelerates or 
slows down in relation to the activated social mass and the energy 
unleashed.

The key is to understand that crises constitute ruptures in the 
historical continuity of imposed peace, moments of dislocation where the 
established order falters and new possibilities open up. In this sense, 
crises become moments of "truth," where the contradictions of the system 
are openly manifested and the forces vying for hegemony are brought into 
play.

A Revolutionary Theory must anticipate and prepare for periods of acute 
crisis, not as opportunities to advance the trench line in anticipation 
of a foreseeable period of retreat, but as a phase as natural in 
capitalism as that of pacification. Any organization that aims to have 
any revolutionary impact and avoid falling into conservative or even 
reactionary positions must be built in such a way that it can anticipate 
and operate in these circumstances.

Building to address broken time

An understanding of class conflict from a revolutionary perspective that 
truly seeks to build a strategic alternative must once and for all break 
with the linear and deterministic notion of historical progress. Instead 
of a smooth and predictable progression toward socialism, the political 
time of class conflict and struggle must be conceived as a discontinuous 
space, marked by ruptures, breaks, accelerations, and slowdowns in 
social time. A serious strategic approach is incompatible with strategic 
conceptions of "socialism outside of time."

We must abandon the idea of a "passive accumulation of forces" because 
we need to develop a keen sense of the situation that allows us to 
discern the opportune moment for action, adapting slogans and tactics to 
changing circumstances. This implies conceiving of the Revolutionary 
Organization as a "Gearbox" capable of acting decisively and swiftly, 
orienting its action toward the development of the class struggle and 
taking advantage of the opportunities that arise in the current crisis.

This proposal necessarily has two direct implications. The first implies 
the need to dedicate sufficient effort to the reading and analysis of 
the current situation, overcoming the idea that socioeconomic analysis 
is carried out in the initial phase of organizational construction and 
that this preliminary survey is sufficient.

Secondly, it requires the organization to be designed to allow it to 
quickly redirect its activities. To ensure this doesn't mean abandoning 
strategic or established spaces, a flexible intervention team seems most 
appropriate. This way, any risk of tailgating is overcome, since the 
redirection of forces is solely linked to the analysis of the situation 
and a specific team, without diverting or paralyzing the entire 
organization.

How accumulation metaphors affect our strategic approaches

The primacy of cumulative thinking and the neglect of issues related to 
the temporality and speed of social processes work against us. It 
prevents us from effectively explaining and addressing these 
acceleration phenomena due to a conceptual flaw that limits our capacity 
for action. Failure to incorporate tools that go beyond the metaphors of 
accumulation and extension limits our practice and our capacity for 
action and adaptation.

Perhaps one of the greatest and worst consequences of not including in 
our theories a more realistic conception of social time, one that is in 
line with the conclusions drawn from the historical experiences of our 
class struggles, is that it leads us to conservative positions. For 
example, the revolutionary process that began in Catalonia in 1937 
pitted two political positions against each other: those who argued that 
it was necessary to go all out, consolidate the revolutionary process, 
and establish workers' democracy, versus those who, seeking to 
consolidate the organizational advances and the strength accumulated by 
the working class around the CNT, opted to restore power to the 
Generalitat and prioritize the anti-fascist Popular Front as a 
preliminary step toward the revolutionary project. The prevailing 
cumulative thinking of anarcho-syndicalist strategy had a gap in its 
theoretical development regarding revolutionary situations and moments 
of Dual Power, through which fear and conservatism crept in.

For a revolutionary theory that conceptualizes time and space

The libertarian movement as a whole and organizational social anarchism 
have made enormous advances in the theorization and practice of the 
accumulation of forces. No one can question the progress that the models 
created by anarcho-syndicalism have brought to our class, the 
possibilities for intervention opened up by social autonomy, and how the 
application of direct action and self-management contributes to the 
development of anti-capitalist subjectivity. The contributions that 
anarchists have made in this area are unquestionable, and we must always 
keep them in mind.

However, this article argues that this development has been detrimental 
to the understanding of revolutionary time. We are probably witnessing 
one of those bourgeois infiltrations that anarchism has historically 
suffered, in this case those of postmodern thought and its assumption of 
the end of history.

This should not be understood as proposing a 180-degree turn or an 
abandonment of the task of developing processes of class 
self-organization, self-management, and strategic autonomy. Nothing 
could be further from our intention. Moreover, what is proposed here is 
not even directly directed at broad projects of self-organization and 
struggle; these reflections are intended to reach the comrades involved 
in the formation of Libertarian Revolutionary Organizations, or specific 
ones that aim to carry out dual militancy. Demanding something like this 
from broad spaces or from organizations of synthesis is completely 
unrealistic by its very nature.

What we are trying to defend is that political-ideological organizations 
that aim to serve the development of the construction of Popular Power, 
consciousness, and class organization must theoretically arm themselves 
with a greater understanding of the phenomena of social struggle, taking 
into account the social time factor. Countering the abuses of cumulative 
metaphors, adding the time factor to our theoretical corpus, and placing 
the question of the Crisis of Capital at the center is an essential task 
in a historical moment of clear increase in political instability. Now 
that Louise Michel is back in our ranks, now that the crisis is once 
again assuming central importance and that processes of social conflict 
are tending to sharpen, bringing back the possibility of opening up 
processes of social struggle, now more than ever, we must prepare 
ourselves to be able to operate in broken time, detect conservative 
tendencies, and counteract them so that processes of social struggle can 
develop.

Miguel Brea, Liza activist

https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/05/28/louise-michel-ha-resucitado/
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