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Stanley Fritz's avatar

I'm looking forward to reading the full piece, have some thoughts on the topic as well, but will hold them until I see where you're headed.

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Stev's avatar

Very confused. Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Deray McKeeson, Linda Sassour and Tamika Mallory were none of them leaders, although Hayden was leader of SDS back around 1962. They were all people who came to prominence through movements, sometimes had good things to say, others not so much, but you can't identify any sort of strategic "and then and then" to their decisions about movements (maybe about their own trajectories). You can do so with actual leaders, like MLK or Ho Chi Minh. Leaderless movement was already something of an idea back around the feminist movement in 1970, and most scholarship on that movement people are fairly proud of this aspect of it, although people also struggle with its limitations. Since then, there have been a bunch of leaderless movements, such as Nicaragua solidarity, global justice, occupy. AOC and Bernie are both elected officials. They both kind of try to be leaders, but when they encourage those they would lead to work with them through the system, usually some large portion of their followers get pissed. I don't think they made a bad decision to sit 2024 out (is AOC even old enough to run yet?) but in any case, I don't see what that has to do with being a leader--do you mean the movement could've used an advocate in the primary? I think a more mainstream figure like Chris van Hollen might've worked better, but nobody bit. I think in some circumstances many people want to act in a disciplined manner and are willing to follow a leader, but in many social movements this isn't the case. So you have currents that emerge, some flourish, others crash, you have personalities, some of whom endure (I remember hearing from Hayden up til his death about seven years ago; McKeeson seems pretty much forgotten at this point) but you don't really have leaders. Is this whole thing about how the Palestine movement, which is basically less than a year old in its current form, hasn't yet generated prominent personalities? It probably will.

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