Insurgent Temporalities: Strategic Temporality in the Socialist Movement and Futuro Vegetal

This paper examines how contemporary social movements develop strategic temporality in response to the capitalist timescape. By comparing Movimiento Socialista and Futuro Vegetal in Spain, it explores how movements emerging from ruptures with previous mobilisation cycles transform latency and crisis from stolen time into resources for political strategy. Building on a Marxist-critical approach, I conceptualise temporality as a regime of power and conflict. Capitalism is understood as a timescape shaped by acceleration, homogenisation, and ongoing crisis; stolen time indicates both the extraction of time and the expropriation of political horizons and future-oriented agency. I argue that movements actively influence these conditions through strategic temporality, the coordinated use of emotions, narratives, and tactics as forms of temporal praxis. Empirically, the study analyses how movements engage in time-work to reconfigure their strategies. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and semi-structured interviews, it operationalises strategic temporality through analytical tools that help understand how movements structure their strategies temporally: temporal positioning, orientation, horizon, and pace. The comparison reveals that, despite differing traditions and organisational forms, both movements reshape latency into a political resource by: (1) mobilising negative emotions as temporal forces that transform defeat, despair, and urgency into revolutionary/disruptive impulses; (2) creating narratives that re-anchor struggles through imaginaries of historical continuity, rupture, collapse, or utopian visions; and (3) deploying repertoires of action that intervene in capitalist rhythms through interruption, endurance, and prefiguration. At a strategic level, however, the movements diverge: Movimiento Socialista maintains a long-term revolutionary horizon through organisational endurance and temporal sedimentation, whereas Futuro Vegetal pursues cycles of urgent disruption aimed at compressed horizons of climate breakdown. By theorising these shared mechanisms and differences, the paper posits that latency is an essential aspect of contemporary contentious politics. Through strategic temporality, insurgent movements create counter-temporalities that challenge the capitalist organisation of time and reopen the conditions for collective agency and emancipatory horizons.