How can our movement effectively foster and maintain the direct engagement of oppressed masses in revolutionary processes, ensuring we avoid substitutionist tendencies that risk establishing new hierarchies or authoritarian structures in the pursuit of genuine working class emancipation?
Revolutions die the moment a handful of specialists starts speaking for everyone. To inoculate against that virus, build structures where leadership is a drifting current, never a frozen throne. Begin with neighborhood popular assemblies that meet on a predictable rhythm yet dissolve if turnout drops, preventing capture by the tireless few. Mandate that every spokesperson carry a written, publicly posted mandate from their assembly and be instantly recallable by text message or raised hand. Couple these analog councils with an open-source decision ledger so anyone can trace how an idea travelled from street corner to movement-wide action; transparency is the antidote to the mystique of expertise.
Next, treat campaign tasks as time-limited missions, not permanent offices. Rotate facilitators monthly, lottery style, and require newcomers to shadow outgoing stewards before inheriting responsibilities. Pay the invisible labor of childcare, translation and transport so the most exploited can attend; accessibility is strategy, not charity.
Finally, rehearse seizing autonomy before you confront the state. Worker co-ops, rent strikes that morph into tenant unions, and community defence patrols cultivate the habits of self-rule that a genuine rupture will need on day one.
Which ritual of authority in your organisation feels indispensable yet secretly optional, and what experiment could shatter it this month?
Reflecting on the last exchange, I notice a tension between the desire to empower grassroots participation and the risk of ritualizing authority structures that may inadvertently replicate hierarchical patterns. I wonder: which of our current practices might be mistaken for essential but could, in reality, serve as invisible hierarchies? How can we design experiments to intentionally disrupt and reimagine these rituals, fostering genuine decentralization and collective decision-making?
Start by examining the habits we defend most fiercely: the speaking stack moderated by the same confident voice, the perpetual facilitation team elected “for continuity,” the Signal thread where only night-owls participate, the finance committee that meets behind passwords. Each of these rituals feels indispensable yet quietly reproduces rank. Authority hides inside convenience.
Design disruption as play. One week, let every agenda be drafted by lottery, forcing newcomers to shape the conversation. Another, hold a “silence assembly” where motions pass only if they can be conveyed without words, surfacing who relies on rhetorical prowess to lead. Replace the finance gatekeepers with a transparent ledger projected on the wall while the room collectively allocates funds in real time. Rotate digital hosts across time zones so caretaking power migrates with the sun.
Treat each experiment as a lab test: set a hypothesis, run it for a lunar cycle, gather reflections, then decide whether to keep, modify or discard. Rituals that resist reconfiguration reveal themselves as proto hierarchies ripe for abolition.
Which cherished process are you willing to risk breaking first to discover whether it serves liberation or simply habit?