Nathan Schneider: What does leaderless look like?
Schneider at Waging Nonviolence ..
For those closely involved in Occupy Wall Street, it seems fitting that the words “take me to your leader” are conventionally said by an alien; they’re about that hard to process, and that weird. Yet one hears this sort of thing a lot. It remains a common refrain among sympathetic well-wishers outside the movement that leaders in the traditional King-Gandhi-Chavez mold are necessary for civil resistance movements, or even that they’re inevitable. But within OWS, leaderlessness — or horizontality, or, as it is sometimes said, being “leader-full” — is non-negotiable. It’s at the very core of why many people in Occupy find the movement so revolutionary, and so empowering, and so right. This doesn’t mean, however, that it’s clear how exactly one is expected to behave in a leaderless movement. What does truly leaderless leadership look like?
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2012 at 8:13 AM and filed under Activism, Blog Posts, Peace, Youth. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.
2 Responses to “Nathan Schneider: What does leaderless look like?”
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I am so enthused by all of this I can not tell you. I have always been afraid that our generation, too old and too tired and beaten down after all those years of conflict and civil disobedience left little for the new generate to understand-“Question Authority”! That our passions had been drained from us. That after all was said and done, Nixon got elected, Bush 1 & 2 became presidents-The second election was stolen and we did nothing about it. This scared me. But now-OWS-I love it-I am hoping that a leaderless approach will indeed be more effective than perhaps we were. I am from the old school-Gandhi, MLKing…leaders, figure heads. We’ll see.
Posted on 26-Mar-12 at 11:50 am | PermalinkIn the meantime, this movement strikes at the very heart of capitalism-of the old method that helps to keeps the masses in a state of illusion-an opiate. After all-if you are in power and that power gives you more power and money, why would you ever want to change anything? Congress, the government, Wall Street, big business-try and change these things and they will brand you, at the very least, a communist. 1% controlling 99%-the way of history. I wonder if, in my lifetime, I will finally see this ‘righted’-corrected. What do you think?
Really very interesting. A whole new method of proceeding. It is going to be interesting to see how it develops.
Posted on 26-Mar-12 at 12:05 pm | Permalink