this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Anarchism
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Discuss anarchist praxis and philosophy. Don't take yourselves too seriously.
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This is a very long-winded way of saying what should be blatantly obvious - there is an extremely evident distinction to be drawn between leaders and bosses.
Nothing screams unseriousness quite like peddling the idea of "leaderless" organisation.
Disagree. Not everything needs leaders.
Occupy Wall Street, Fuck Cars etc. These movements didn’t have leaders but did quite well.
There were lots of people playing leadership roles during Occupy. Lots.
Antifa? Lots.
BLM? Lots.
Every goddamn resistance movement in the history of human civilisation? Positively a shitload.
Stop being unserious.
I think the fundanebtal problem is what a leader is.
I heard/read something about how to set up crews/packs/whatevertheyrecalled for competitive dog sledding. You don't put the fastest or strongest dog in front. You put a curious adventurous dog in front.
So a 'leader' in this case, and i think what we need, isnt bosses or managers, but closer to explorers and scouts, people with initiative courage and creativity to try shit and be examples/report back. Solve disputes with evidence and forging known paths-that can still be disregarded or altered by those farther back.
And i think most of us can do that in at least one direction.
Not that we dont need coordinators or administrators at scale, but we dont have to pair those roles with authority/command. We can unbundle shit, cut out the rot/waste, and recombine it in new ways. Ask your radical queer friends about the concept!
Maybe, for example, administrative tasks pair better with caring tasks or research/social science tasks than authority ever allowed.
The fundamental question is not simply what a "leader" is, but also what a "follower" is - both are active roles that require agency.
We can make this a lot easier for ourselves if we identify and reject the authoritarian and hierarchical baggage that the word "leader" has been hamstrung with. Once we do, we can simply redefine, for ourselves, what the terms "leader" and "follower" mean in ways that actually makes sense in a non-hierarchical context.
Bosses and managers do not lead - you can accuse them of plenty of things, but leading isn't one of them. The corporate world, in fact, absolutely hates leadership ability in every kind of way possible, and the reason is really not that hard to see. Corporations run on the same kind of toadyism you find in the political party world - absolute loyalty to the people above them in the corporate hierarchy, not responsibility to the people below them.
Any concept of "leadership" that emerges from these worlds deserves to be rejected out of hand.
Have you ever read 'bullshit jobs' by david graeber?
Yes. I did not find it all that interesting - perhaps because I've never lived or worked in the imperial core.
Debt: The First 5000 Years was much better.
That one was fucking amazing. That man could write.
They don't need to be formal leaders to be leaders. In a cooperative video game it's pretty normal to have everyone just milling about until one or two people take charge of organizing. You might have one person herd a party together while another informs on strategies and organizes people into roles. They're often not even the leader of the party as designated by the game; it's the social dynamic of deferring to someone who seems to know what they're doing that matters.
Here's the thing... leadership is never a formal thing. They even acknowledge this in military writings (though never directly) - even old Sun Tzu drew a distinction between someone who is followed due to trust and respect and someone who merely has a rank.
This presents us with a golden opportunity to redefine what this term means - not just for those familiar with radical politics, but for those who aren't, too. If our much stronger and sensible understanding of leadership contrasts starkly with the wishy-washy esotericism the term is ladden with in the hierarchical world - well, let's just say that you can't buy that kind of propaganda.
Even if someone merely has a rank, you still have to listen to them if they've been assigned authority over you within a system that coerces your compliance under a threat of some kind. What phrase would be better to describe this kind of authority?
Lol. Lmao even
Usually I'd post this to !breadtube@slrpnk.net, but unfortunately slrpnk will be down for a while, and figured I'd share it here in the meantime.
Is this community only for higher level discussions? I think for people newer to anarchism it's a good encapsulation of the concept it tackles.
Considering the (thoroughly unjustified) confusion about this subject matter, I don't think it's only "people newer to anarchism" that needs to see this.
Ah, when you mentioned it was long-winded and should already be blatantly obvious, I thought you meant it was not useful information.
My eye-muscles are badly strained due to them constantly rolling into the back of my head every time I hear some genius who confuses their counter-cultural circlejerking with actual political theory talk about "leaderless organisation" in anarchist spaces.
So no... it's not useless information. I just think this is something that should have been sorted out long, long ago.