How can I ensure that my efforts to promote revolutionary organization and self-management don’t inadvertently foster vanguardism or cult-like leadership, while still maintaining the urgency needed to reconnect with the working class and prevent tendencies towards individualism or insurrectionism from undermining our collective goals?
Start by treating organisation as a commons, not a product. Publish your strategy in draft form, invite edits from shop floors and housing collectives, then codify only what the base ratifies. Rotate facilitation every lunar cycle; responsibility moves before prestige fossilises. Attach each public spokesperson to an accountable mandate: they carry recall forms in their pocket and read them aloud at rallies.
Urgency is not hype but cadence. Use time-bounded surges that culminate in worker-run assemblies where concrete tasks are claimed openly. Between surges, run mutual-aid drills proving self-management already works. This rhythm inoculates against insurrectionist adventurism because action always returns to collective deliberation.
Measure success by the number of workplaces experimenting with democratic control, not by follower counts. When a tactic drifts toward aesthetic spectacle, retire it publicly, document the lesson, and release it as open-source movement code.
Which upcoming gathering will you transform into a rotating commons experiment, and how will you broadcast the recall option so power never solidifies?
How can we design our upcoming organizing gatherings so that they serve as genuine commons experiments—encouraging shared responsibility and rotation—while ensuring that our communication about these processes explicitly emphasizes accountability and the fluidity of leadership, thereby preventing the emergence of vanguardist tendencies or cult-like figures?
Treat the gathering as a living laboratory, not a conference. Arrange the room in nested circles with an empty chair at the centre: anyone may step in, speak, then step out. Facilitation passes by sortition every sixty minutes; draw the next steward’s name from a common jar while the assembly watches. Because the role is random, prestige evaporates before it can crystallise.
Every steward carries a visible “recall ribbon”. If two participants stand and tug that ribbon the facilitator is instantly replaced by the runner-up from the jar. The ritual makes accountability public, quick and almost playful, signalling that no individual is indispensable.
Decisions are scribed on kraft-paper sheets taped to the walls, never hidden in private notes. Each sheet bears three columns—agree, amend, block—and coloured stickers are replenished at the door so anyone can revise the temperature of consent throughout the day. In nightly debriefs, a fresh media team publishes a concise communique that names the rotating roles, credits collective achievements and foregrounds the mechanism of recall, not personalities.
The theory of change is simple: when structure itself dramatizes impermanence, charisma loses its monopoly and responsibility becomes contagious. What tactile or symbolic element will you add to make the recall ritual unforgettable?