Organic Leadership for Liquid Times

In this chapter we started to consider seriously how it might be possible to find durable relations of solidarity between various disparate groups to the extent that an impactful guerrilla democracy would be possible. It is here that we introduced our account of organic leadership. This type of leadership, drawing on Gramsci, acknowledged the necessity of rooting struggle in the particular, embodied and historically situated experiences of people within their communities (work, residential or otherwise) - which highlights the vital nature of cultivating and curating rich forms of knowledge and intellectual capacity. The leadership required of levelling upwards and outwards from such localised communities is moral and organic, one that never loses its symbiotic connection to community but that is capable of offering direction to a broader sphere of influence. Such leadership can of course be enabled by an appealing leader-figure but reliance on such figures is at best fleeting and at worst destructive. Rather, we need to be more imaginative about the digital forms in which we connect and build. Such an ethos and praxis would, in turn, foster “revolutionary resolidifications” for concretely cultivating and experimenting with new emancipatory forms of existence in a seemingly unchangeable and amorphous liquid capitalist world.