A thread / primer on what happens with leaderless movements (most people don't need a primer, but some stubborn don't-get-it's do. I've had to block or mute "dirtbag left" people over this rather than their ideology per se)

What happens with leaderless movements? Well they don't have leaders, that's right there in the phrase. So there is no one to tell people in the movement do this, don't do that.

Therefore these movements are *always* producing something somewhere that people can condemn

Maybe these movements can have some kind of sophisticated control-structure networking without leaders per se? No, because it takes sophisticated organizers to set that up, who really are de facto leaders.

Why don't these movements have leaders? is the next question. They don't have leaders because the US security state has gotten better and better at killing, imprisoning, discrediting, or (most likely) co-opting any such leaders who arise on the left.

So when something happens -- for instance, when the US goes through an incredible Covid-19 crisis and police killings provide sparks -- a leaderless movement springs up.

Then people get a video and say "look, these people are violent or undisciplined or silly"

Yep! That's a direct result of our society destroying the people who would have turned the movement into an org chart with someone at the top to make strategy and people below that to choose tactics and so on, generating some kind of reforms and neutralizing the movement

I wrote about this back in Occupy days, in 2011:

http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2011/10/return-of-some-guy-with-sign.html

Can you be on the left *and* be against strict ML-esque party discipline *and* slag these protests? No, you can't. If your reaction to these protests / riots / uprisings / whatever is to say people should go back home and stop doing whatever they're doing, you're on the right

That doesn't mean that you need to approve of whatever stupid or violent thing someone involved in the protests does, but it does mean that you need to understand why that's happening, and stop coming up with stupid theories of the protests that categorize them as unitary blocs

If you want more than a primer there are any number of texts on "horizontalism", which is often taken as an ideologically good way to organize but sometimes as a necessity.

/fin