On the political climate and the need for revolutionary organisation
“Revolutions have their own rhythm, punctuated by accelerations and decelerations. They also have their own geometry, in which the straight line breaks at the bifurcations and sharp turns of history.” Daniel Bensaid, Politics as a Strategic Art
There is a fundamental difference between chronological time and political time. The former unfolds in a seemingly uniform manner: days follow days, and development is linear. The latter, however, under the dialectical logic of a contradictory reality, is very different: There are historical periods in which months or even years seem to contain very few substantial transformations, while there are moments in which, in a matter of days, political reality can be radically transformed.
This means that political time cannot be understood simply as the succession of events on the calendar. It is, above all, the pace at which the relationships between social forces, institutions, organisations, and the possibilities for political action change. There are specific events that, based on the accumulation of internal contradictions, appear as turning points, making possible, in qualitative terms, what until recently was unthinkable.
A society can remain seemingly stable for years and yet be accumulating contradictions. These contradictions don’t necessarily manifest themselves immediately. They can remain separate, partially invisible, or even appear unconnected. An economic crisis, a labour dispute, a housing crisis, a particular police action, a popular mobilisation, or an institutional crisis may seem, individually, like isolated phenomena. However, they can establish connections between them: each event modifies the conditions under which the next ones occur, and each new conflict can amplify, accelerate, or transform the previous ones. It is at this point that the acceleration of political time appears, the concrete expression of latent contradictions.
It is not that an isolated event creates a revolutionary situation out of thin air. Rather, it happens that a prior accumulation of contradictions finds certain events capable of condensing them and making them politically visible. The event then acts as a catalyst for processes that were already developing in society.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-chosen circumstances, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
The history of the Paris Commune can serve to illustrate this point. The Commune did not simply emerge as a consequence of a single event on March 18, 1871. Prior to this, there had been an extraordinary accumulation of conflicts: the Franco-Prussian War, the French defeat, the fall of the Second Empire, the Siege of Paris, the organisation and arming of the National Guard, the growing tension between the government in Versailles and the Parisian population, and the political radicalisation of certain sectors of the city. For months, elements had been building that altered the situation.
But there comes a point when this buildup changes pace. The government’s attempt to withdraw the National Guard’s cannons from Montmartre on March 18 triggers a rupture. Within days, what might have seemed like just another political crisis transforms into a completely different situation : the government loses effective control of Paris, the National Guard assumes a central role, and on March 26, elections are held for the Commune , which will be proclaimed two days later.
The important thing to understand is that no one could have foreseen how it would all end. For Kropotkin, the existence of the Commune began to create possibilities that previously couldn’t even be formulated in the same way. According to him, the idea of the Commune wasn’t conceived suddenly by an individual; he presents it as something born of collective intelligence. Therefore, we don’t want to claim that the Commune was inevitable. It wasn’t. The important thing is to understand that a series of processes that had been developing for months were able to crystallise into a qualitative transformation in an extraordinarily short period.
In January 1917, Lenin, in exile in Zurich, did not consider the Russian Revolution imminent. He spoke of it as a coming revolution that perhaps his own generation would not live to witness. In his own words: “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this revolution.” However, he did not doubt the historical possibility of a new revolutionary wave. Just a few weeks later, the fall of Tsarism radically transformed the horizon of what was possible. What in January had appeared as an indeterminate historical prospect had become by March a concrete political situation that required intervention.
This allows us to understand something fundamental: the acceleration of political time does not mean that suddenly everything is possible. It means that the boundary of possibility can shift rapidly. What yesterday seemed politically unfeasible may become a concrete possibility tomorrow. And, likewise, a possibility that seemed open may quickly close.
That is why political acceleration is also a strategic problem.
The event and the accumulation
We can apply this reflection to a much more immediate scale. Let’s consider an eviction like Maricarmen’s. The eviction, viewed in isolation, might seem like a specific conflict between an individual and a vulture fund, a legal matter, or a particular housing claim. But certain conditions may already exist surrounding this event: organised groups, solidarity networks, prior experiences of struggle, social unrest, conflicts with institutions, and a shared awareness of a broader problem. The eviction can then become something more than the specific case that triggered it. In the words of a colleague, fires are unpredictable, but it is our duty to stockpile flammable material for when one appears.
It is not about denying the particularity of each conflict, but about understanding how it can relate to other conflicts and how it can contribute to building a collective force and, of course, one capable of exceeding the predictable.
A concentration of power can produce a primary network of affinities. This network can enable further mobilisation. The institutional response can generate outrage. Outrage can increase participation. Participation can lead to a convergence of forces. Organisation can connect the conflict with other conflicts. And these conflicts, in turn, can modify other sectors’ perceptions of their own possibilities for action. In this process, feedback occurs: an acceleration of conditions and conflicts, an intensification of repression, and a primary awakening of consciousness among much broader segments of the population. There is not necessarily a straight line between the initial event and the final outcome. It is a concatenation of events that interact dialectically. One struggle modifies the conditions of another; a partial victory can generate confidence for a subsequent struggle; a defeat can produce demoralisation or, conversely, new forms of organisation; a repressive response can contain a movement or provoke a broadening of solidarity. In short, a regime of acceleration in which each event ceases to be merely an event and begins to modify the conditions of subsequent events.
And that is precisely where the organisational problem arises.
Getting organised when time speeds up
During periods of stability, the need for a revolutionary political organisation may seem abstract. If struggles develop slowly, are subject to inertial bureaucracies, conflicts are absorbed by institutional mechanisms, and demands appear isolated from one another, it may seem sufficient to intervene in each specific conflict.
But when the political clock speeds up, a different question arises:
What do we do with the strength we’ve managed to accumulate? How do we make the fire spread?
“Because mobilising is not the same as organising” (Jane McAlevey). And winning a specific demand does not necessarily mean having built a political force capable of transforming the social relations that produce that demand.
Every struggle also generates different possible directions. A mobilisation can be channelled toward institutional negotiation, it can be limited to resolving the specific problem that originated it, it can become a broader organisational experience, or it can connect with other conflicts and produce a new form of collective power. Events can shift from being quantitative to being qualitative.
Deactivating or diverting the struggle doesn’t require imagining a permanent conspiracy by institutions or union bureaucracies. It’s about recognising that in every struggle there are actors with different interests, positions, and strategies. Some will seek to resolve the conflict quickly; others will try to broaden its scope; others will seek to institutionalise it; others will try to keep it within certain limits acceptable to barbarity.
Therefore, a struggle does not have a predetermined political direction. Acceleration opens up possibilities, but it does not, in itself, determine where they will develop. However, this statement requires a fundamental caveat: intervening in a struggle does not mean appropriating it.
This issue was especially important for anarchist thought and, in particular, for Malatesta and Fontenis. Faced with the false dichotomy between absolute spontaneity and top-down direction, they defended the need for revolutionary organisations capable of intervening in social movements, but without turning that intervention into a replacement for those leading the struggles.
A revolutionary organisation can contribute analysis, coordination, experience, strategy, and a broader perspective; it can try to connect specific conflicts and help a struggle develop its full political potential. But there is a fundamental difference between intervening to strengthen the autonomy of a struggle and intervening to turn it into an instrument of an external organisation.
The revolutionary should not position themselves above the struggle to dictate from the outside what it should do. Nor should they merely observe it passively in the name of spontaneity, as if there were no interests within the conflict itself seeking to co-opt or channel discontent. Their task is to deploy political action within it, contributing whatever can increase its class independence and organisational capacity, without replacing the subject who leads it.
In this sense, the revolutionary organisation would be a mediator between the spontaneity of the struggle and the conscious construction of a political strategy. A strategic operator for emancipation.
The organisation as strategic mediation
The role of an organisation is not to artificially accelerate history or to replace those who are leading a struggle. Nor is it simply to wait passively from the couch for a revolutionary situation to arise so it can intervene. During periods of relative stability, the organisation must build the necessary capacities to take political action when the situation changes. It must pivot constantly between objective and subjective conditions, between social reality and a revolutionary program.
In other words: the revolutionary organisation establishes itself in periods of calm in order to develop its strategy before political time moves too quickly.
When acceleration arrives, there is no longer enough time to build a strategy, relationships, activist cadres, a political culture, coordination mechanisms, and the capacity for intervention from scratch. Everything that hasn’t been built beforehand will have to be improvised when conditions become more difficult.
The organisation is, therefore, a form of political accumulation, of antagonistic capital.
But this accumulation should not aim to build a structure separate from society that would later seek to govern it. Its function should be to build capacities that can be placed at the service of broader collective processes. To move from being committed militants to revolutionary cadres. In the words of Fontenis: “The class before the party.”
Therefore, we can perhaps formulate the relationship between organisation and movement in the following way:
It is not about directing the struggle from the outside, but about increasing from within its capacity to organise, understand itself and defend itself against deviations.
In fact, the false dichotomy between organisation and mass front is too often presented, when it is actually a dialectical relationship: organisations contribute to the fronts, political action within the fronts contributes to the development of activists within the organisations, organisations base their programmes on the fact that the fronts perceive or feel the progress is coherent, and the spaces improve qualitatively through constant theoretical and practical development. This is always done with honesty and activist ethics.
Organisation provides memory when the movement is subject to the urgency of the event. It provides perspective when the conflict threatens to be reduced to its immediate dimension. It provides coordination when the struggles appear fragmented. And it provides strategy when a situation arises in which decisions made in days can have consequences for years.
From individual struggle to revolutionary cadre
There is a fundamental question here: to identify the political potential inherent in a given struggle. A specific demand may contain a much broader contradiction.
Defending a home can open a discussion about property ownership.
Defending a job can open a discussion about who makes the decisions in production.
A fight against a particular institutional measure can open a discussion about who has the effective capacity to decide on the living conditions of the majority.
The organisation can help make that connection, but it cannot impose it mechanically. It has to start from concrete reality, from existing relationships, from the level of consciousness, and from the current state of the class struggle.
In this sense, the revolutionary programme should not be understood as a list of slogans applied externally to any conflict. It must be a tool for interpreting existing contradictions and guiding intervention toward transformations that expand collective capacity. From this arises another role of the revolutionary organisation, mentioned earlier only superficially: that of creating revolutionary cadres —individuals capable of applying revolutionary theory and translating it to the concrete context where the struggle is unfolding. Revolutionary politics, then, does not consist of mechanically applying a pre-constructed program to any situation. It consists of maintaining a permanent, focused yet flexible relationship between program, organisation, movement, and reality.
The notion of a revolutionary cadre is not a label for “enlightened” militants, but rather the idea that selfless and committed militancy alone is not enough, that the task is immense and, for that reason, no less inspiring. It is time to develop a program and build strategic unity. A unity founded on fraternal debate and the political will to move forward.
Not all acceleration is revolutionary
This also helps us understand why not all political acceleration is necessarily revolutionary.
A crisis can produce radicalisation, but also fear or reaction. It can generate organisation, but also retreat. It can broaden the struggle or create the very conditions for its eradication. It can open the possibility of a rupture or strengthen existing structures. In fact, we are at a moment in which the intensification of contradictions within capitalism can cause an overlap of events that accelerates the course of history in one direction or another. History neither warns nor asks permission.
Acceleration does not determine the outcome: what it does is reduce the time available to intervene in a field of possibilities that is still open.
For years, what seems impossible remains outside the political horizon. Until an accumulation of contradictions, an unexpected event, and a particular balance of power produce a qualitative transformation. Then, the question ceases to be whether it is possible. The question becomes which actors exist and what direction they want to give to the situation. Politics leaves no vacuum, and if we are not there, others will be.
We have certain sectors, after the moment of social outrage following Maricarmen’s eviction, clamoring for a new 15M movement. These sectors, with their reformist leanings, are simply seeking an accumulation of indignation that will crystallise into yet another parliamentary alternative. This will only fuel the reactionary forces due to their real inability to impose any real change on our conditions. The 15M movement was an acceleration process that caught us, at best, in a cobweb-filled basement. We lacked the effective capacity to steer that process toward more revolutionary positions. Reformist bureaucracies, the media apparatus, and the movement’s internal contradictions dissolved any possibility of change. The revolutionary obligation is to be prepared for the opportunities that history will open for us.
Get organised before the acceleration arrives
Therefore, a revolutionary organisation cannot be conceived solely as a structure intended for moments of crisis. It is precisely in moments when seemingly “nothing is happening” that the possibilities for intervention are built when everything starts to happen. It accumulates experiences, relationships, knowledge, tools, trust, and collective capacities that can acquire a completely different value when the situation changes.
And when political time imposes a new pace upon us, those unprepared for this acceleration may discover that, while they are still trying to grasp that the situation has changed, others are already intervening. Revolutionary organisation is, ultimately, the conscious construction of a political capacity to intervene at that moment when history ceases to unfold according to the calendar and thus ushers in historical cycles.
What would happen if Maricarmen’s eviction, as a concrete event, opened up previously unimaginable opportunities? What position would that put us revolutionaries in to contest the path these mobilisations would take? Do we have enough strength to stand up to the bureaucracies and reformist sectors? The answers, if given honestly, are bleak.
Our task is to prepare ourselves, not to replace those who make history, but to help, to the best of our ability, to clarify the interests of our class.
We can help accelerate history; events don’t happen by chance. There are always actors and subjects involved. Be that as it may, we must take sides. To navigate the waves of history, to write its lines.
Liza, Anarchist Platform
Liza is a revolutionary platform of anarchist socialists located in the cities of Madrid and Granada
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