With regard to man as a biological individual, time is set by the experience

of generations - childhood, adolescence, youth, middle age,

and old age succeed each other and provide time with a rhythm.

Tragic events, whether individual or collective, can take place, socio-economic

changes can extend the average life (as occurred in the 20^th

century), but in any case the significance of biological time is a stable

element.

Political time, on the contrary, is a historical time subject to the dialectics

of accelerations and decelerations. "There are days that are

worth twenty years - Cervetto reminds us, citing Marx - and yet, in

the movement of matter, one day is one day." The strategic divide of

1989, that sanctioned the end of the East-European State-capitalist

regimes that had been passed off as socialism, was a remarkable evidence

thereof.

Biological time and historical time merge in the psychologies of the

individuals who are the protagonists of class struggle. This is difficult

terrain, because it is subject to the inevitable commingling of rationality

and emotions. A revolutionary, a Marxist, anticipates the paces

of social changes in his heart. It should not surprise, therefore, that

the class movement, through the voice and understanding of its best

representatives, has often imagined faster paces than the actual ones.

At the end of the 19^th century, during a phase of full capitalist expansion,

August Bebel did not realize it, and affirmed at the convention

of the Social-Democratic party in Erfurt (1891) : "Indeed, I am convinced

the realization of our goals is so close at hand that few of you

in this hall will not live to see it."

Science only can emancipate us from the ascendancy of present time,

that almost inevitably leads to mistakes about the reality of today -

perceived as absolute reality, independent of any evolution - and

thence prepares the disappointments of tomorrow.

This emancipation, this freedom, does not pursue any abstractly predicted

aims, but practical objectives. Cervetto wrote : "Revolutionary

strategy is based on the analysis of times, not to arrange the future, a

task for which an objective real movement doesn't have any need,

but rather to establish time deadlines that can act as references in defining

immediate tasks in the present, the tasks of tactics. (...) Tactics

address temporary situations that are multi-faceted combinations, to

take up Lenin's definition, of long-term historical processes." The

more solid the strategy, the more flexible can tactics be. The `question

of times' finds its place in practice, in the daily struggle : "Science

is freedom, and it is such because it is not a theory detached from

practice. Instead, it is practice guided by theory."