Challenging the Capitalist Timescape: Mobilising Negative Rhetoric and Emancipatory Strategy

This article examines how emancipatory movements use narratives of defeat and negative/dystopian rethorics to challenge the capitalist timescape, identifying these narratives as opportunities for antagonistic forces to emerge as antagonistic forces striving to control and overcome capitalist social relations. Using a theoretical framework based on the sociology of time and social movements studies, it explores how social movements disrupt the capitalist hegemonic continuum or timescape by employing strategies that subvert temporalities aligned with capitalist dynamics. The study focuses on two case studies, the Socialist Movement in Spain and a climate movement (to be determined). The article contextualises these movements within moments of political impasse and disarticulation. In the Spanish case, the Socialist Movement emerges from the post-anti-austerity cycle, navigating a landscape marked by political stagnation, while the climate movement represents a broader response to ecological crisis under late capitalism. The methodology combines Framing and Documental Analysis of social media, journals (2018-2025), interviews with activists and Participant Observation, aiming to interpret the mobilising frameworks, diagnose the catalysts for mobilisation, and understand the strategic articulation and practices of both movements. The findings highlight how a rhetoric of urgency, rooted in a dystopian vision of the future (whether due to the intensification of the capitalist crisis or impending ecological collapse) serves as a catalyst for mobilisation. It also shows how the case study strategically employs prefiguration to create a counter-temporality with the potential to be sustained over time, as it is strategically aligned with its emancipatory strategy. Based on these findings, this article highlights the need for further research into how negative axes, prefiguration, and strategy help sustain counter-temporalities in social movements, aiming to develop a framework for understanding and enhancing emancipatory coordination across different contexts and crises.