In the beginning… was the collective: Fallism, collectives, and “leaderlessness”

Abstract In this paper, we trace debates on the origins and morphology of the Fallist student movement in South Africa, a social movement that advocated for decolonized, free university education, and an end to the exploitation and outsourcing of poorly paid Black university workers. As we argue, a neglected area of study is Fallism’s relation to cultural production. When examined through the lens of cultural production, it becomes apparent that artivist collectives in Cape Town created the space for Fallism to emerge into public view when it did, with calls for the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. Like these collectives, Fallism had decolonial impulses and nontraditional structures of leadership. In fact, we argue that collectives provided a model for Fallism to adopt an ethos of “leaderlessness,” or at least to morph in and out of being leaderless. Though thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri see leaderlessness as predisposing social movements to the weakness of unsustainability, we argue that there is another way of interpreting the morphology of social movements that adopt a collective or leaderless ethos.