Mark Bergfeld

Student ID: bs13455

PGT 130693891

Queen Mary University of London – School of Business and Management 19.08.2014

Leaderless Leaders? Southern European Activism in London

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Abstract

Contemporary social movements in Europe such as the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, the

indignados protests in the Spanish State and the Que Se Lixe a Troika movement in Portugal, have

been labelled “leaderless” (Penny 2010, Mason 2011, Castells 2012, Juris 2013, Graeber 2013). It in

this context that newly arrived Southern European migrants in London have adopted this label for

their activism. The author does not accept the label as an adequate explanation of the complex

relationship between protest organisers, movement- activists and the social movements they

participate in. Through the use of participant observation and in-depth interviews, he seeks to analyse

(1) how do Southern European activists make sense of leadership and “leaderlessness”; (2) what

socio-economic and political factors contribute to the rejection of leadership amongst Southern

European migrant activists; and (3) what function do these activists perform in the wider migrant

community, and within social and labour movements in Britain. The author finds that there are

different overlapping typologies of leaderships – both relational and skill-based - in contemporary

social movement organisations of newly arrived migrants in London. While these activists may reject

the label of “leader” they perform functions akin to that of a leader within the wider migrant

community and trade unions. However complex and contradictory the findings, this dissertation

project make a unique contribution to the study of leadership in contemporary social movements and

trade unions.

Keywords: Migration, Social Movements, Trade Unions, Leadership, Leaderlessness,

Eurozone Crisis

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 4

Preface .................................................................................................................................................... 5

Introduction: Crisis, Migration and “Leaderless” Movements ............................................................... 9

Research Aims and Objectives .......................................................................................................... 12

Literature Review: Theorizing Leadership in Social Movements .......................................................... 15

Leadership in Trade Unions .............................................................................................................. 15

Dialogical Leadership: it’s not what you say but when you say it .................................................... 17

Leaderlessness reconsidered ............................................................................................................ 19

Collective and Informal Leaderships in Social Movement Organisations (SMOs) ............................ 21

Research Strategy: “Asking we walk” ................................................................................................... 23

Towards Solidarity and Activist Research ......................................................................................... 24

Participatory Observation and Online Ethnography ......................................................................... 26

In-depth Interviews ........................................................................................................................... 27

Ethics ................................................................................................................................................. 30

Typologies of (Anti-)Leadership ............................................................................................................ 33

Primitive Rebels ................................................................................................................................ 33

A class fraction in the making? ......................................................................................................... 36

The Power of the Admin ................................................................................................................... 39

Collective Intelligence ....................................................................................................................... 42

Liquid Leadership .............................................................................................................................. 44

The Roots of Leaderlessness ................................................................................................................. 47

Crisis of Authority ............................................................................................................................. 47

Acting out of Affect ........................................................................................................................... 50

No gods, no masters, no leaders? ..................................................................................................... 53

The Leadership Function of Southern European Activists .................................................................... 56

… in the trade unions? ...................................................................................................................... 56

… in their communities? ................................................................................................................... 61

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 65

Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 69

Appendix 1: Glossary of Organisations ................................................................................................. 74

Appendix 2: Biographical Sketches ....................................................................................................... 77

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Acknowledgements

This dissertation project is dedicated to my parents Heather and Mike who

have showered me with their love and unconditional support for the last 27

years. There are no words that could express my gratitude. I would also like to

thank my dissertation supervisor Professor Geraldine Healy for her support,

her honesty and encouraging words in our meetings. She rekindled my interest

in trade unions in the first place, for which I am grateful. All the interviewees

and participants in this research project deserve special thanks from myself

and everyone else out there. Your activism, organizing efforts and lives have

inspired me. I hope that this project will show the mark you have left on me.

Without you this project would not have been possible. Albert, Liliana Zuna

and Mariela Maitane also deserve a special mention for making their photos

and artwork available as well as sourcing photos across various platforms and

social media sites for this project. The following other people deserve a

special thanks: Anne Alexander, Colin Barker, Kenneth Bergfeld, Anindya

Bhattacharyya, Nathan Bolton, Robin Burrett, Paolo Gerbaudo, Sukhdev

Johal, Dominic Kavakeb, Giuliano Maielli, Elizabeth Mantzari, Jonathan

Maunder at ZedBooks, Sandra Moog, Laura Saunders, Dan Swain, Daniel

Trilling, Win Windisch, and Luigi Wolf. All of you have encouraged me,

stuck with me, and provided me with food for thought to last some people a

lifetime. Thank you.

Mark Bergfeld, Köln 19/08/2014

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Preface

On Sunday 11 May 2014 I was invited to speak at a meeting on European

citizenship organised by Migrantes Unidos – a group of newly arrived

Portuguese migrants in London – at Passing Clouds in Haggerston, London. It

was the final meeting in a series of three. The first two had been titled “Our

voice” and “Citizens of the UK?”. A week ahead of the European Union (EU)

elections, the meeting brought together Portuguese, Spanish and Greek

migrants who had previously demonstrated outside their embassies, at the EU

Commission building in London and wherever their foreign and financial

ministers had addressed crowds.

More than two years had passed since this same groups of migrants had

mobilized together as PIIGS Uncut on the Trades Union Congress (TUC)

organised mass demonstration on 20 October 2012. Nearly three years had

passed since they participated in the Occupy London encampment outside St

Paul’s Cathedral. Now they were huddled into a room to discuss the rise of

UKIP’s anti-immigration policies; their rights as EU citizens in the UK; the

euro; the prospects of the UK leaving the EU; and how Germany’s export

economy continues to exacerbate trade imbalances within the eurozone.

As I spoke about the limits of European citizenship I recognized many faces in

the room: Claudia, Victor, Katerina, Marco, Rodrigo and Rafael, who knew I

was working on related questions and had invited me in the first place. For the

last three years our paths had crossed at various activist gatherings, meetings

and assemblies. These included events held outside the Spanish embassy,

organised by the activist group the Coalition of Resistance, by the UK student

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movement and by Occupy London. Yet it was only on that Sunday evening

that I realized these activists, who had previously rejected organization,

leaderships and political parties, had moved on from their initial positions and

opinions as I had encountered them during the height of the British anti-

austerity movement in 2011.

Claudia and Victor, two of the most prominent activists within the early days

of the Spanish 15M movement in London, were now campaigning for the

European Greens in London. Rafael, a Portuguese activist, had taken part in

industrial action with his University and College Union (UCU) branch in

recent months. The same was true for Katerina, a Greek anti-capitalist activist,

who now even held a position on her local UCU committee. In the meantime

their original organisation London Contra A Troika had transformed into

Migrantes Unidos, with Marco organising a number of debates and a strategic

reorientation. None of this had been planned when Rafael set up a Facebook

group back in September 2012 and invited friends to join him and Diana for a

demonstration outside the Portuguese embassy in Belgrave Square. Other

activists who had helped organise assemblies, such as Esther, Pancho and

Petros, had moved on to France, Germany or in Petros’s case back to Greece.

As the debate on an unusually warm and sunny Sunday evening dragged on, a

bald man – by far the oldest participant in the meeting by far – intervened to

exclaim:

I don’t care whether you are a British citizen, European citizen,

Portuguese or Spanish citizen. I don’t care about left-wing parties, right-

wing parties… I only care about the workers. We are all workers and we

need to stand together.

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No one clapped. People’s faces were blank. His message did not resonate with

anyone in the room. His working class internationalism was a relic of the past,

like the ancient black and white television set decorating the room. These were

los indignados, les enragés, precários inflexíveis – a generation for whom the

language of workers, trade unions, social democratic and Communist parties

was as foreign as their new country of residence – if not even more so. When I

spoke to Spanish activist Claudia after the meeting she polemicized against the

man: “I don’t care about what he said. For f—k’s sake, I am not a worker – I

care about humans.”

People like Claudia had been involved in countless mobilizations,

demonstrations and actions against war, climate change and other political

causes. Her goals of social and gender justice were mostly likely congruent

with those of the bald man (whose name I did not find out). To an outsider,

she would have been considered part of the left. But when she spoke she used

the language of universal citizenship, real democracy, horizontalism, social

movements and precarity – notions associated with the global movements of

2011 rather than the rank-and-file revolts of the 1970s.

In the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse, Claudia and her fellow Southern

European migrant activists were thrown into the forefront of the fight against

austerity. The preceding 30 years of neoliberal offensive had eradicated many

of the social ties and traditions that working class resistance had come to

depend on. Tired of the apparent inefficacy of one-day strikes and votes for

social democratic parties, they had come to reject elections, institutions and

traditional working class leaderships, and strive for autonomy from them.

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Like the generations of activists and radicals who preceded them, they had to

renegotiate their positions in the course of countless mobilizations and

numerous meetings. The learning processes continue as I write this. I believe

they have a long road to travel – but their ruthless criticism of the old and

relentless search for new truths will shape the future of working class politics

and social movements in years to come. In writing my dissertation project on

these activists and their journey, I hope to make a modest contribution to this

common development and to the working class protest movements of today.

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Introduction: Crisis, Migration and “Leaderless” Movements

By the time this dissertation project is read and marked six years will have

passed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It is fair to state that neither

trade unions nor traditional parties of the left have been able to defend their

members’ and supporters’ interests against ensuing austerity measures and

declines in living standards (Seymour, 2014). For all the talk of recovery, the

average person in Britain is worse off in terms of GDP per head than six years

ago (Wearden & Fletcher, 2014). Countries such as Portugal, Italy, Ireland,

Greece, Spain – the so-called PIIGS – have little hope of escaping a vicious

cycle of recession and unemployment. According to the International Labour

Organisation’s Global Employment Trends 2014, it is the young in particular

who have suffered the consequences of economic decline and instability (ILO,

2014). The fact that youth unemployment rates exceed 55 per cent in Greece

and Spain should ring alarm bells for trade unions, parties of the left and

policy makers alike.

Yet all the only solution that politicians such as German chancellor Angela

Merkel or Portuguese prime minister Passos Coelho have come up with are

calls for Southern European youths to migrate (Wise, 2012; Evans, 2013). The

past dream of European mobility with Erasmus programmes and cheap

Ryanair flights has become a nightmare of forced economic migration for tens

of thousands of Southern European young people. The OECD calls this “new

wave of intra-European immigration” an “adjustment mechanism” (OECD

2014). Despite the on-going racialization of Eastern European migrants from

Romania and Bulgaria and the scaremongering about British Muslims in the

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wake of the 9/11 attacks, Southern Europeans migrants have not been subject

to the same kind of oppressive or nationalistic discourses by British media or

politicians. However, British prime minister David Cameron stated that if

Greece was to leave the euro or its economy collapsed, Britain would need to

consider immigration restrictions (Watt, 2012).

Although many Southern European young people decided to migrate since the

economic crisis, a vast number of their peers have taken part in protest

movements against austerity, neoliberalism and for democracy in their

respective home countries. In Spain, mostly young protesters labelled “los

indignados” occupied 200 town and city squares in May 2011. In

neighbouring Portugal, the Que Se Lixe a Troika (Screw the Troika)

movement saw more than 1.5 million people take to the streets on 15

September 2012 and 2 March 2013. These were the largest demonstrations in

Portugal since the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in 1974 (Principe, 2013). In

Greece, the killing of the 15-year old student Alexis Grigoropoulos in

December 2008 ignited a wave of social movements with an insurrectionary

character led predominantly by the young (Sotiris, 2013). Often these

movements were labelled “leaderless” in character and form (Penny, 2010;

Mason, 2011; Castells, 2012; Juris, 2013; Graeber, 2013).

Meanwhile, Southern European migrants in cities such as Berlin, London and

Brussels have been organising demonstrations, direct actions, debates and

events to correspond with events back home or to demonstrate against visits of

by their foreign and finance ministers. In this dissertation project I focus on

Southern European activists, their groups and actions, due to the scope and

time available to me. However, I do not shy away from addressing immediate

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links or insights where they appear these in this piece of research. Thus I

examine the recently launched 15M worker action group in Berlin which helps

migrants with workplace issues (Doncel, 2014). This group was set up by

Pancho, who had spent one year in London and whom I interviewed for this

research project.

***

In the wake of 15 May 2011, Spanish immigrants in London organised

assemblies and camped outside of the Spanish embassy in Belgrave Square.

The newly arrived Greek migrant community was quick to hold assemblies in

Trafalgar Square while their peers occupied Syntagma square in Athens in

June 2011. Since then, Greek activists in London have organised evenings in

solidarity with the worker-occupied ERT television and radio station,

demonstrations against the murder of anti-fascist Pavlos Fyssas and many

more demonstrations outside the Greek embassy in Holland Park. Among

others, they helped organised a debate on the future of the euro after the

radical left coalition Syriza’s electoral breakthrough in June 20121. Younger

Portuguese migrants followed suit and called a demonstration under the

banner London Contra a Troika when their peers mobilised back at home.

In the course of the last three years, Southern European migrant activism in

London has adapted to new circumstances and frequently risen to new

challenges, just like the movements they continue to refer to2. The initial

novelty of this type of leaderless, decentralized and Internet-empowered

1 The meeting was recorded and can be found on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDhfNCBOu20 (accessed 2 August 2014) 2 For a full list of organisations, their size and activities please refer to Appendix 1

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activism has worn off. Periods of high leve mobilization have been

interspersed with periods of reflection, everyday resistance, debates and

strategizing. Notions once held dearly are being questioned, practices once the

norm no longer prevail, and principles are uprooted. The activists involved in

these groups, networks and organisations provide particular insights into

contemporary activism and forms of collective action precisely because of

their relatively marginal role within Britain’s labour and social movements. It

is thus of particular interest what socio-economic and political factors

facilitate the rejection of leadership prevalent among these activists; what

function their activism performs within the wider migrant community, and

within labour and social movements in their new country of residence; and

how they seek to negotiate the question of leadership and “leaderlessness” in a

new environment.

Research Aims and Objectives

Drawing on the literature of leadership in social movements and trade unions,

this dissertation project addresses the following research questions:

How do Southern European activists make sense of leadership and

“leaderlessness”?

What socio-economic and political factors contribute to the rejection of

leadership amongst Southern European migrant activists?

What function do these activists perform in the wider migrant community, and

within social and labour movements in Britain?

***

In addressing these questions I have made use of ethnographic methods, such

as participant observation, online ethnography and in-depth interviews. I draw

particularly upon the notion of “activist research” (Hale, 2006) or “solidarity

research” (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014) which views activism as a form of

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knowledge co-production. This form of research facilitates the

democratization of the relationship between researcher and research-subjects;

and the co-participation of the research-subjects insofar as it allows for the

“creative process of collective theorization and knowledge production carried

out from inside social movements” (Juris 2013:24). This project avoids any

kind of analytic closure, and thus hopes to transcend the leadership/leaderless

dichotomy which has come to prevail the study of leadership in social

movements.

The first section of this dissertation seeks to understand whether new digital

media technologies actually facilitate leaderlessness, or whether they in fact

create new types of leadership within activist organisations. On the basis of

interviews and online ethnography, I argue that we are witnessing a new form

of leadership – the power of the admin (Gerbaudo, 2013) – within social

movement organisation. This is based on who controls Facebook groups, who

has the biographical availability to write emails and who displays media-

savviness. Furthermore, I draw on activists’ own conceptual frameworks of

“collective intelligence” and “liquid leadership” to show that so-called

leaderless activists in fact reject particular kinds of leadership. These activist

theorisations require social movement researchers and trade union scholars to

rethink how we conceive activists’ own “sense-making” while social

movement researchers’ theorizations go unnoticed by the activists themselves

(Cox & Nilsen, 2007).

The second section of this dissertation takes a step back and focuses on the

socio-economic trends and factors which facilitate a rejection of leadership

and have heralded an era of “leaderlessness”. I argue that we are witnessing

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what Gramsci labelled a “crisis of authority” (Gramsci, 1971). Social

democratic parties and trade unions are in as much of a crisis as bourgeois

parties. According to my interviews and participation observation with

Southern European migrants, young workers experience the crisis of authority

as precarious migrants, and as a marginalized and individualised class fraction

in the making. The result is an open political space which they seek to fill with

with an anarchist-influenced and affective politics which is anti-hegemonic. It

stops short of replacing the narrow economistic and bureaucratic social-

democratic leadership, but needs to be recognized as a growing phenomenon

in its own right.

In the third section I concentrate on the function these activists perform, and

the wider implications of their activism in accessing leadership within trade

unions and their respective migrant communities. The research participants

and interviewees generally decline to acknowledge that they perform

leadership roles within their groups, networks and organisations. But they

nonetheless function as so-called leaders within their wider migrant

community by organising events, and responding to current events in their

home countries. Moreover, they assume leadership within trade unions despite

their lack of resourcefulness, strategic capacity (Ganz, 2000) and strategic

leverage, or “Handlungsfähigkeit”, as Nachtwey and Wolf put it (Nachtwey &

Wolf , 2013). Although means that they cannot act as a “hegemonic force”

(Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) for wider layers, their function as “brokers” (Diani,

2003) between these growing migrant communities, local trade unions and

social movements is remarkable given the timescales in question and their

generally marginalized position.

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Literature Review: Theorizing Leadership in Social Movements

Leadership in Trade Unions

In recent years there has been growing interest in leadership and trade unions

(Ganz, 2010; Sadler, 2012; Kirton & Healy, 2012; Gall & Fiorito, 2012;

Nachtwey & Wolf, 2013). Here researchers seek to illuminate the links

between union commitment, membership participation and leadership.

Sadler examines the direct and indirect effects of high and low-level local

union leaders on various forms of member participation. She identifies

multiple leadership roles which foster union participation. For her, leadership

in trade unions relies on “transformational leadership, interactional justice,

interpersonal skills and participatory leadership” (2012:781). This chimes with

John Kelly’s notion that “transformational leadership activate[s] particular

social identities and that ‘subordinates’ then behave in terms of their group

identity” (Kelly 1998:35). Here leadership is conceived as one-way

transmission of commands and entails strict hierarchy, as the use of the word

“subordinates” makes clear. Inadvertently this strand of literature can help us

to understand the types of leadership that activists examined here reject.

Gall & Fiorito argue that the above conception of leadership falls short since it

does not include a notion of “activism” (2012:716) or members’ self-activity.

As the research subjects in this dissertation project do not hold official

positions within their groups and networks, the notion of “activism” allows us

to search for other sources of legitimation. While this insight renders Gall &

Fiorito’s approach more dynamic, there is a qualitative difference between

analysing leadership in workplaces (where people work together and negotiate

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their position vis-à-vis their management) and leadership for activists who

seek to render issues in their home country visible at the symbolic level, and

often do not even seek to effect an immediate policy change.

Based on decades of organising experience in the trade union movement with

the United Farmworkers, Marshall Ganz argues that leadership is

“motivational, relational, strategic” and that “action skills— and the capacity

to develop these skills in others—play key roles” (Ganz, 2000:521). It

constitutes a craft, or a knowledge-based practice, which can be accessed by

individuals. Leadership allows groups of people to unlock strategic

potentialities. For Ganz, strategy, the command of resources (both internal and

external to the organisation) and leadership are interrelated and flow from one

another. Ganz’s proposed model does however run into trouble with groups

and networks who do not articulate a strategy, such as the activists in question.

Does that necessarily mean that they lack leaders? How can we explain the

fact that some activists function as leaders while others do not?

Kirton & Healy offer a tentative answer through their complex accounts of

female trade unionists in Barbados, Britain and the United States (2012a,

2012b). They outline the problems faced by women who emerge as trade

union leaders at workplace, branch, local, regional and national level in white

and male dominated contexts (2012; 2012b:981). They advance the idea that

leadership cannot be accessed automatically, or by everyone.

The result is that women union leaders are often “atypical” – older,

childfree and sometimes partner free… [S]ome women with heavy

family and domestic responsibilities do participate and seek leadership

positions in unions because for them union work is not a “burden”, but a

route to an interesting, purposeful and satisfying life… Leadership roles

often come at a huge personal cost to women and men, but the issues for

women are particularly potent. (Kirton & Healy 2012: 734)

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Kirton & Healy’s research has a lot to offer when researching Southern

European migrant activists. Other studies confirm that interpersonal factors

such as “the privilege of presence” (Fox Piven in Khatib et al, 2012) and

“biographical availability” (Ganz, 2000:523) – having time and no family –

are important factors in considering the ability or inability to access

leadership. But how does that change when all research subjects are of a

similar age group (young, mostly without family)? Does their biographical

availability permit a different kind of sociality/sociability? To what extent are

there different ways of performing leadership and taking up roles? The notion

of biographical availability will allow us to understand which factors (socio-

economic, political, personal) inhibit people from assuming leadership, despite

having the practice-based knowledge required.

Dialogical Leadership: it’s not what you say but when you say it

The concept of “dialogics” (Bakhtin, 1986; Volosinov, 1986; Vygotsky, 1976)

constitutes a theoretical framework and tool of analysis to understand how

leadership constitutes itself as a knowledge-based practice. The “dialogians”

have sought understand the unity of speech-language-activity in the process of

protest movements. They stress that speech and language is not only a one-

way transmission but also an “appropriation of the material world” (Vygotsky,

1976). These critical psychological theories from within the Marxist tradition

see speech-language “as mediating tool between the individual-self and the

socio-collective experience of unequal social relations under capitalism”

(Brook, 2013:333).

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In congruence with the writings on leadership inside of trade unions, authors

such as Colin Barker and Chik Collins regard leadership in social movement

as a relational practice (Barker, 2001; Collins, 2000). They do not differentiate

between leader and follower, or speaker and listener. Instead they set the

listener and speaker on a level playing field. These theories can be read in a

new light given recent social movement practices such as the “human

microphone” at Occupy Wall Street which forced people to break down their

sentences into chunks which could then be collectively repeated by the crowd.

Barker provides useful starting point into transcending the leadership-

leaderlessness distinction by endowing both speaker and listener with agency.

The listener is as significant a participant as the speaker, indeed is

preparing to switch places and formulate a “counter-word”, even if no

more than a grunt of assent or dissent. Listeners become speakers, and

speakers listeners, in a transforming process of social dialogue. On both

sides, we find agency and creativity. (Barker, 2001)

More mainstream sociological accounts have grappled with the form of speech

and listening as activity. Pierre Bourdieu emphasises “the right moment”

(kairos) of when one speaks over the content of what is said. To know what is

acceptable/unacceptable and what can be absorbed by the listener at any given

moment is a knowledge-based practice, yet at a different analytic level than

that which Ganz proposes. Bourdieu calls the relationship between language

and situation the “linguistic habitus”, i.e. the system of dispositions to say the

fitting word. (Bourdieu, 1990:48). The speaker expects a reaction from the

listener and tailors the message accordingly. Both Bourdieu’s and Barker’s

insights raise pertinent methodological issues insofar that every movement-

participant is potentially a so-called leader.

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Leaderlessness reconsidered

As mentioned in the introduction, the label of “leaderlessness” has been

increasingly applied to new social movements (Penny, 2010; Mason, 2010;

Juris, 2013). However the above debates do not necessarily reflect that, with

the exception of Boehm et al’s study of (anti-)leadership in anarchistic SMOs

(2013). This is partially due to the ideological assumptions on behalf of those

who research social movements, and is further complicated by a lack of

consensus on methodology (Sadler, 2012; Gall & Fiorito, 2012).

I would argue that the label “leaderless” does not suffice to explain the

complex relationship between protest organisers, movement activists and the

social movements they participate in. Actions and events do not rise out of

nowhere – they involve co-ordination and coalition building, paying attention

to pre-existing social ties, mobilising structures and social networks. The

political theorist and Occupy supporter Jodi Dean has even argued that the

notion of “leaderlessness” has inhibited social movements in their further

development (Dean, 2012:54), while Barker traces the dominant anti-

leadership discourse back to the “ideologies of spontaneity” which came out

of the New Left in the 1960s (Barker, 2001).

David Graeber and Paul Mason, however, argue that Occupy Wall Street and

other social movements of late have been “leaderless” because of their use of

so-called networked technologies which have rendered centralised leadership

structures obsolete (Graeber, 2013; Mason, 2011). Occupy Wall Street, the

indignados and other movements involve decisions taken by consensus at a

general assembly, or through devolved working groups.

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However a closer look at Twitter users discloses that it is a medium based on

the function of “following” people. Active Twitter users usually have more

followers than people they follow. In other words, they become leaders or

experts through the number of followers they command. Rather than

obliterating leadership within social and political activism, leadership is

simply outsourced to those who are media-savvy, have journalist contacts on

Twitter, or can express themselves well in 140 characters (Gerbaudo, 2013).

As the movements of 2011 have waned a number of tensions and battles broke

out over the accountability of the admins of Occupy Wall Street’s Facebook

pages and Twitter accounts (Levine, 2014). For example, different factions of

the former Occupy Wall Street protests continue to control different Facebook

and Twitter accounts (Gray, 2014). This has led to different demonstrations

and actions being called on different days (Susman, 2011), and even to

antisemitic posts being issued from one of the accounts (Pontz, 2012; Ynet,

2012). Moreover these Facebook pages have at times issued conflicting

statements on behalf of Occupy Wall Street. Even worse, individuals such as

Justine Tunney has used the OWS Twitter account to promote herself and start

a Kickstarter campaign for her own private militia (Levine, 2014). This has

diluted the political efficacy of Facebook pages that millions subscribe to.

They elevated Facebook and Twitter administrators into new and

unaccountable leadership positions. In light of these developments, the digital

dimension requires further analysis when studying the formation of leadership

in social movements.

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Collective and Informal Leaderships in Social Movement

Organisations (SMOs)

During the Occupy Wall Street protests the anthropologist David Graeber

wrote that “the first decision ensured that there would be no formal leadership

structure that could be co-opted or coerced” (Graeber, 2011). None of the

organisations and activists in this study have a formal leadership structure, but

that does not mean that leadership is not performed or related functions are not

assumed by individuals. Instead leadership functions on different levels, and at

different levels of analysis. Someone has to execute tasks to facilitate

successful collective collaboration. How this function is met or which tasks

are to be executed can be organised in different ways.

Even those aligned with contemporary forms of “leaderless” activism and

social movements have started to theorise leadership in different ways. The

Occupy Research Collective has coined the term “leaderful” (Occupy

Research in Khatib et al, 2012) while activist-academic Dana Williams asserts

leadership in a positive way: “There are no leaders (or, more radically,

everyone is a leader).” (Williams 2012:19). By conceiving leadership as

vested in collectives and flowing from sets of collective practices and

knowledges from below, they contribute to a growing field dealing with forms

of “distributed leadership” in organisations (Drath et al, 2008; Spillane, 2004).

These theoretical concepts however require further study. It remains to be seen

whether activists make sense of leadership in this way.

More problematic is the fact that distributed leadership is still confined to top-

down processes. Nevertheless it opens up possibilities to think about

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leadership as a transient phenomenon in contemporary social movements, as

something that can be accessed and then passed on. If we conceive of

leadership as transient or fleeting, or perhaps even a function which can be

taken up by multiple people at different times – even within the same

campaign, mobilisation or meeting – we can start to make sense of how

Williams and the Occupy Research Collective arrive at the conclusion of

“leaderful” movements. In allusion to the transient nature of leadership,

Robinson writes:

Leadership is “exercised in moments when ideas expressed in talk or

action are recognized by others as capable of progressing tasks or

problems which are important to them” [Robinson 2001:93]. (Boehm et

al, 2013, emphasis added)

This also allows us to conceive of leadership in a broader sense than through

the prism of elected positions to trade union posts or formalised committee

structures inside SMOs. It helps us understand leadership by paying particular

attention to the ability of leadership to flow out of the collective collaboration

of individuals.

23

Research Strategy: “Asking we walk”

Just as the activists I have engaged with, followed, shared stories with and

interviewed throughout this period, I have embarked on a journey which can

be summed up by the Zapatista maxim of “asking we walk”. I first

encountered the assemblies outside the Spanish embassy in May 2011. At the

time, I held an executive position within the National Union of Students

(NUS). I invited Spanish migrant activists to speak at student meetings at the

London School of Economics, King’s College London and other institutions.

In the years that followed, I travelled to Portugal as an independent journalist

to cover the social movements and European-wide general strike in the

autumn of 2012. This brought me into contact with Portuguese migrant

activists from London Contra a Troika which would become Migrantes

Unidos as the Troika, at least officially, pulled out of Portugal. Finally, three

days into having returned to academia to study at Queen Mary School of

Business and Management, the Greek anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas was

murdered by members of the fascist party Golden Dawn on 18 September

2013. This sparked the largest protests in Greece since the mid-2011. On the

following Saturday, I attended the solidarity vigil among thousands outside the

Greek embassy in London’s Holland Park.

Developing a robust research method has been an intrinsic part of this research

project from the very beginning. I employed a number of ethnographic

methods, such as participant observation, in-depth interviews and online

ethnography. The strategy here is two-fold. On the one hand, I use invocation

to raise awareness of the issues of these newly arrived Southern European

24

migrants. On the other hand, I draw on the most recent research by Haiven &

Khasnabish (2014) who propose a strategy of “convocation” which ultimately

amounts to “a process of critical self-reflection, of locating oneself and one’s

struggles within multiple intersections of power, and of change and

transformation.” (2014:17). This means introducing new lines of questioning,

opening up a space of debate and discussion as well as collaborating creatively

and theoretically alongside the research subjects (or better, participants).

These two strategies need not stand in contradistinction to one another but can

rather complement each other. This dual strategy I believe overcomes the

challenge of occupying different roles throughout this research project.

Towards Solidarity and Activist Research

A number of research methods such as surveys (Nachtwey & Decieux, 2013;

Daphi, Rucht et al. 2014), discourse analysis (rf. Howarth, Norval &

Stavrakakis, 2000) and focus groups (Freire 1970/1993; Touraine 1981;

Melucci 1996, Munday 2006) were considered for the purposes of this

dissertation project but deemed inappropriate to answer the research questions

as none of them could account for activists’ learning processes and

movements’ strategic developments, and understand the economic and socio-

political roots of ‘leaderlessness’.

Social movement researchers often choose to analyse so-called “successful”

movements which show tangible results such as the efficacy of its demands,

policy changes or the formation of new institutions/organisations. But the

activists I have focused on have been chosen because of the challenges they

encounter and the ways they seek to renegotiate ideas or make sense of

25

activism in a foreign setting. The use of ethnographic methods allowed me to

immerse myself into a setting and participate alongside them in their situated

activity. Understanding the continuities and differences between cycles of

mobilization required this type of politically engaged form of ethnographic

research “which not only generates knowledge that we hope can be useful for

those with whom we study but also potentially constitutes a form of activism

itself”. (Juris, 2013:9).

Recent publications such as Jeffrey S Juris’s Insurgent Encounters:

Transnational Activism, Ethnography and the Political (2013) and Paul Brook

& Ralph Darlington’s article Partisan, Scholarly and Active: For an Organic

Public Sociology of Work and the Case of Critical Labour Studies (2013) act

as methodological starting points for my research. Both draw on and widen the

scope of Participatory Action Research (PAR). According to both, social

movement research ought to democratise the relationship between the research

object and subject, the researcher and the researched. In doing so, it

understands social movements as knowledge-producers and researchers as co-

producers of that knowledge. Furthermore, social movement research ought to

produce research from within the movement for that movement. Juris writes

that “the only way to truly grasp the concrete logic of activist networking is to

become an active practitioner” (Juris, 2013:26). In the process of praxis, the

researcher allows him or herself to be transformed by the findings in as much

as participants transform themselves in the process of contention.

26

Participatory Observation and Online Ethnography

There are different levels of participation when adopting an ethnographic

approach. In this dissertation project, I did not choose to conduct covert

participation as it would violate the principle of informed consent. It would

have also inhibited me from the openly enquiring and asking questions. I was

a participant as observer. I was thus able to empathize and ‘walk in activists’

shoes’ rather than just sit on the sidelines.

My status as a Greek-German migrant in the UK created the sense of a

common experience between me and the research participants that I doubt

would have been achieved if I were a British citizen.

In the case of this project there were the following periods of participatory

observation. Given my extensive diary writing and note taking over the years I

was able to draw upon:

• engagement with 15M assemblies outside of the Spanish embassy in May

2011. This included video interviews for YouTube channels, and building links

with Spanish activists by inviting them to address activists from the UK

student movement.

• individual participation at the occasional demonstrations outside of the Greek

embassy.

• participation in Occupy London Stock Exchange and the events of the

University Tent City.

• participation as a committee member and speaker in the Coalition of

Resistance “Europe Against Austerity” Conference in which Spanish and

Greek activists from London participated.

• news reporting on the London Contra a Troika demonstration outside the

Portuguese embassy, Belgrave Square.

• speaking at the Migrantes Unidos meeting “European citizens?” at Passing

Clouds, Haggerston on 11 May 2014.

The phases of participatory research have been complemented with an online

ethnography as proposed by Slater & Miller (2000) and Hine (2002). This

27

allowed me to follow the group and individual activists at all times, even when

not geographically present. The online ethnography involved following the

organisation’s webpage, blogs, keeping track of press statements, Facebook,

Twitter and YouTube accounts, being part of email discussions as well as

following the way the organisation was presented in the media. I even was

granted admin rights to the “Solidarity with the Greek Resistance” Facebook

page. This particularly helped my attempts to grapple with who the key

activists were in different arenas.

Searching through Facebook groups, Twitter accounts, hashtags and websites

narrowed the number of possible interviewees. There were three groups of

people. First, there were those who held admin rights or were “power users”

on Facebook, such as Marco and Katerina. Second, there were those who

appeared on YouTube videos and similar media, such as Claudia and Victor.

Third, there were those who appeared in the media through theorizing their

activities, such as Rafael, who wrote a blog post for the trade union magazine

Labour Briefing.

In-depth Interviews

In-depth interviews constituted the central part of my research. They were an

effective and practical way of obtaining data on the meaning behind people’s

individual and collective actions inside of social movements (Ritchie & Lewis,

2003:138). Interviews require the activist to grapple with his/her different

affinities and affiliations, and to try and figure out how they think about the

world at large and the way they related to new settings. The method allowed

respondents the time and scope to talk about their opinions and values.

28

Interviewees did not simply reveal knowledge about themselves, but also

about the world they live in, how they operate inside their particular media

environment, and how they negotiated “leaderlessness” and leadership. The

data generated in interviews was primarily based on “listening to people and

learning from them” (Morgan, 1998: 9). It fitted well with my overall research

strategy, given the paucity of information available on this group of activists

and their activities.

According to Clough & Nutbrown (2007) the effectiveness of interviews

depends on the on the communication skills of the interviewer. Given my

previous research in training in the Doctoral Teaching Centre at Goldsmiths

College, University of London, and my previous research experience at the

University of Essex, I saw myself as well-equipped to undertake these

interviews. The interviews lasted between 45 and 90 minutes each.

There were challenges in interviewing everyone I had selected from online

ethnography. There was no problem getting in touch with activists over

Facebook or email. But many of those who had been active in one or the other

group, network or circle no longer lived in London. Thus I convened

interviews via Skype with Petros, who now was back in Athens, and Pancho,

who had moved to Berlin. For social scientists, online interviews are a “new

interview genre” (Ardevol & Gomez-Cruz, 2012) as they are multi-modal

(video, sound, chat functions, hyperlink function, can be recorded) and in no

way inferior to offline interviews. This provided a unique insight into

Pancho’s new group, the 15M Worker Action Group in Berlin, which was also

featured in Berliner Zeitung, Der Spiegel and Spain’s El Pais around that time.

29

Katerina raised one of the challenges herself when she said: “Even with this

interview it would be completely different if it were happening in Greek”.

This is true. Yet the fact that all interviewees have university degrees (or even

work in a university setting) and speak and write in English very well made

this less of a problem than if I were to interview racialized, marginalised or

less well educated migrants. I did, however, pay particular attention to the

length of the interviewees, setting them in places of their choosing and seeking

to make the situation as accessible as possible.

I strategically abstained from using computer programmes such as NVivo or

others to code the interviews given the small sample size of interviews.

Further criticisms of NVivo include that it can lead to the fragmentation of

knowledge, and create its own analytical categories which are based on

mechanics rather than on grounded knowledge (Bazeley 2006: 7) Instead

coding them manually by drawing on themes that emerged in all interviews

and then dividing them into sub-themes. The first four themes I identified in

the interviews were: work, leadership, activism and the Internet. I then went

about and created sub-themes which took my literature review into account

and were primarily based on what the actors themselves described. This

method allowed me to counter the fragmentation of knowledge which so often

occurs. I was also accompanied by a Spanish artist-activist at some interviews

who would sketch the conversation, and thus facilitate my coding method, and

even determine categories and sub-categories to analyse the data.

Based on my dual strategy of invocation and convocation I chose to feature

activists’ own words as much as possible. If labour has been deprived of a

voice under neoliberalism, this is even more the case with marginalized groups

30

such as migrants, women, people of colour, workers and other subaltern

groups. The participating activists here experience marginalization far too

often, even within activist circles. Too frequently social movement research

seeks to describe the demands and activity of these groups without letting

these marginalized groups actually tell their own story or find their own voice.

Interviews cannot necessarily overcome this problem, but treating the

interviews as co-production of knowledge (as opposed to mere generated data)

can facilitate a shift in the way we think about their role and the functions they

play. Most recently, Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin have shown that it is

possible to use activists’ words as theorizations in their own right rather than

as rejections or confirmations of theories developed in academia (2014). In so

doing, they write for social movements rather than simply about them. This

project follows in that vein.

Ethics

I have worked on the basis of informed consent which seeks to balance

participants’ interests with so-called policy objectives, moral considerations

and interests of third parties. In doing so, I have drawn on Durham

University’s Community-based participatory research – a guide to ethical

principles and practice (2012) and the British Sociological Association’s

Statement of Ethical Practice. My participation in the ESRC Doctoral Training

Centre in Qualitative Research has provided me with a solid foundation in

understanding different ethical approaches and associated questions.

I completed the university’s Fast Track Ethics Questionnaire which

subsequently was approved. Throughout the project I have sought to foster

31

mutual respect, democratic participation, personal integrity and the

establishment of protocols between the researcher and the community in

question. One of these protocols was to guarantee that research participants

could be anonymised. Indeed, one participant sought anonymity. As a

consequence, I have anonymised all interviewee participants for the sake of

consistency. Another protocol was not to disclose their workplace so as to

avoid sanctions by employers. Lastly, I made all participants aware of the fact

that they could withdraw their consent at any given time throughout the

project.

None of the participants partake in any illegal political activities, or endorse

tactics which could be deemed harmful to individuals, groups of people or

private property. This facilitates a reciprocity and equality between the

researcher and the participants. The sustained contact between the two parties

facilitated ethics which are in many respects superior to those associated with

researchers solely seeking “academic capital” in form of publications and

papers. This is underlined by the researcher’s commitment to social change

and opposition to all forms of oppression.

The use of online research methods such as online interviews raised new

questions which had to be answered in the course of the situated activity. For

example, I had not previously agreed with interviewees whether we would use

a webcam during Skype calls. I therefore asked which option they would like

without indicating any preference on my part. One person decided to use the

webcam, the other did not for technical reasons. Thus the dissertation project

provided opportunities for a re-engagement with ethical questions over

ethnographic methods.

32

As a researcher I am committed to positive social change and view research as

a tool against all forms of oppression. This created the basis for good practice.

Interviewees felt confident enough to ask to see transcribed interviews and

notes taken, for example. The majority entrusted me with the interview

material in good faith.

33

Typologies of (Anti-)Leadership

In this section I argue that the current literature on leadership within trade

unions and social movements does not suffice to understand the complex way

in which leadership formation among Southern European migrant activists

take place. I contend that due to their position as a class fraction in the

making, we find three overlapping typologies of leadership in such informal

organisational structures in their groups and networks. This leadership is

internet-empowered, collective and liquid.

Primitive Rebels

Some of the Southern European activists such as Rodrigo, Katerina and Petros

first came here as students and remained in Britain as the economic situation

in their home countries worsened. According to Guy Standing, the

phenomenon of student mobility is under-theorised despite the fact that

numbers have increased by 50 per cent between 2001 and 2008 (Standing,

2011:92). However others, such as Anita, Marco, Victor, Claudia, Rafael, and

Pancho came to the UK to work (some of which included periods of study and

research). Katerina observes a shift toward the latter in the migration pattern

of young Greeks coming to London:

The demographics have changed in the last year. Most people were

either students or stayed here to work after their masters. That is the

majority of people who came to the Greek embassy and meetings. Very

few people will be here for many years or you could call them an older

generation. Half of the people, or most of the people, have already left

and returned to Greece. If we update the list of people it is impossible. In

the last six months or year I can see the difference in demographics. You

can see the students who stayed to work. But now you can see working

people coming over, not people who have studied: waiters, chefs… that

kind of proletariat [laughs] coming. In terms of the Solidarity with the

Greek Resistance we don’t see that change though.

34

Unlike in the 1960s and 1970s when migrants came into vibrant industrial

trade union structures in Northern Europe, new migrants enter service sector

jobs such as delivering pizzas (Pancho), or work in cinemas or bike repair

shops (Victor). Even when they work in software companies like Marco, trade

union structures barely exist. Universities are the exception. Southern

European migrants such as Katerina and Rafael accordingly are trade union

members. Nonetheless, these workplaces have become bastions of precarious

work and casualization of labour, and members’ interests have not been

defended. In this sense, these activists are not part of the traditional working

class with bonds reaching back for generations. As can be seen from the

literature, and from my observations and interviews, this has far-reaching

implications for their practices. It offers a possible explanation for their

rejection of leadership, their difficulties in accessing leadership, and the way

the two relate to one another.

In his book Primitive Rebels, Eric Hobsbawm describes the “character of such

movements [as] often undetermined” (1959:2). These activists do not squarely

fit into the category of the socialist or labour movements. Hobsbawm contends

that these “primitive rebels” are often first generation immigrants from

varying heterogeneous class positions. According to him, they are:

pre-political people who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a

specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world

(Hobsbawm, 1959:2)

This partially explains why the Migrantes Unidos organised a meeting on

European citizenship, UK citizens and one called “Our voice”. They are

35

seeking to find their place. It also starts to put Claudia’s aversion toward the

older worker, as mentioned in the preface, into context. The activists neither

fit into existing networks of Greek, Spanish or Portuguese professionals nor do

they fit into the local trade union movement. As a matter of fact, they do not

even fit into the picture of the migrant which has come to dominate

mainstream discourses. Unlike Bulgarian and Romanian migrants, these

Southern European migrants are not racialized. Nor are they undocumented, as

are the vast majority of migrants are worldwide. Instead they have legal, civil,

political and social rights as EU citizens. During one of the interviews, Anita

recalled discussions on this issue:

At the beginning we didn’t even call ourselves migrants. We were into

other things. We looked at the world in terms of European citizens.

There are connotations with being a migrant, maybe people could join

the movement, maybe people wouldn’t… cause the issue of migration is

huge.

Citizenship is based on exclusions and continuously produces new forms of

exclusions and inclusions in order for the ruling class to maintain leadership

and hegemony. It is therefore questionable whether citizenship can be a

positive reference point for their activities. In the same sense, the notion of

leadership is based on exclusions which activists seek to avoid at all costs.

Thus leaderlessness is a way to signify openness or an undogmatic stance to a

wide variety of ideas, rejection of ruling class values, and the pursuit of an

emancipatory project beyond the old language of central committees,

communism and socialism. In so doing, these migrants, like others before

them, successfully turned their marginalisation, exclusion and exploitation into

a “terrain of resistance” (Munck et al, 2012) – which the widespread

phenomenon of precarity had apparently undermined.

36

A class fraction in the making?

Arguably we are dealing with a new social category of highly educated

migrants who, thanks to the economic crisis, have become a “modern

circulant” (Standing, 2011:92) or “habitually mobile” (Candeias, 2014). The

individual activist biographies highlight this in more depth. While some would

like us to believe that these people are part of “the precariat” (Standing, 2011)

or “a new class emerging” (Mason, 2011) I would argue that they are part of a

growing social strata – “a class fraction in the making” – given the continued

predominance of contractual work and non-migration of workers in Northern

Europe.

For example, Petros and Pancho have lived between three different countries

in the last three years. Their “habitual mobility” stands in contradiction to their

“biographical availability” and renders it impossible for them to acquire the

relational and dialogical skills to access and perform leadership in the

traditional sense. But due the continuous growth of this “class fraction in the

making”, its political importance in the context of the eurozone crisis, and its

role in the accumulation regime, they are able to access leadership in newly

arrived migrant groups. They might not necessarily build up “resourcefulness”

or “strategic capacity”, but their tactical aptitude (in calling demonstrations,

organise meetings etc.) offers them a possibility to lead.

Both Ganz (2010) and Nachtwey & Wolf (2013) write about the necessity of

strategy in the process of leadership formation. Yet none of these activists

have a clearly formulated strategy, let alone strategic leverage as a member of

this “class fraction in the making”. This became particularly obvious in the

37

wake of the European elections, when all of my interviewees had problems

voting. They issued a press release on the topic, which led to a story in the

Portuguese press and one in the Independent in Britain. Yet their lack of

strategy meant that their campaign #votedenied merely remained at the

symbolic level.

Rafael is well aware of the problem that there is a lack of strategy which

inhibits them from changing policy, or in fact anything at all.

These demonstrations create a bit of a sense of false perspective though

but in the end people think we didn’t do anything there. We were

supposed to demonstrate but we didn’t change anything by being

there… In the back of people’s heads there was this idea of visibility in

our country of origin. That was what people were aspiring for. It has to

do with the fact that you emigrate, you disappear a bit. It’s a way of

restoring things.

Being part of this “class fraction in the making” is first and foremost an

individualising experience as the majority of individuals lack the strategic

capacity and biographical availability to access leadership, while social bonds

and ties have been mostly eradicated in the workplaces and neighbourhoods

they enter. In all my interviews and discussions, individualisation and

marginalisation played a prominent role. Katerina attributed her experience of

marginalisation and individualisation to different political traditions and

cultures. Anita claimed it was language which complicated things for her,

citing participation in Occupy assemblies as an example. In turn, this

individualisation facilitates a rejection of elected and established leaderships.

The following examples highlight the wider problem at hand. Claudia says:

We are far more individualistic… The social context is so radically different from 30 to 40 years ago, not only in the forms that people

organise themselves, but also that people have become more

38

individualistic. People have become consumers. We’re not citizens,

we’re consumers… Usually people are more concerned with their own

careers and professions, their personal development and not so much

with justice. They haven’t left Spain in exile. They are not exiles from

the Civil War. They are people who have left because they want to

progress according to the terms of capitalism, so I don’t think they are

potential recruits for the movement.

Rafael says in a similar vein:

The way you live, the way you work. You always feel like you are a step

behind. You don’t have the same voice. That has been a barrier. But

there’s also personal reasons. I have been very precarious doing small

jobs and trying to survive, trying to get my way into doing what I want

to do, being a researcher. Partly, it’s a bit like selfish individualism I

suppose… But you don’t have a proper collective when you are

precarious. You don’t feel like you belong to a body in which you can

take part… And in our universities our problems our precariousness,

lack of solidarity. If you have to fight like this, everyone is fighting

against each other, very individualized. We have all these impositions of

value measurements which negate our critical work.

At first glance their lack of “biographical availability” would render it

impossible to organise members of this “class fraction in the making”. But we

should reject such an economically reductionist reading. It is not the case that

their indeterminate transitional position within the regime of accumulation

simply determines their situated activity as “leaderless”. The activists in

question do assume responsibility within their own organisations such as

Migrantes Unidos, Solidarity with the Greek Resistance, 15M Londres, PIIGS

Uncut and others. Some actors such as Rafael and Katerina even participate

and lead in their local University and College branches (UCU), despite

Rafael’s utterance that “migrants are not part of the union”. Others are active

within coalitions such as the Coalition of Resistance or the People’s

Assembly, which are both funded by Unite the Union and have strong links to

the National Union of Teachers (NUT).

39

The socio-economic position of Southern European activists as precarious

migrants and a class fraction in the making only offers a partial explanation as

to why they would reject formal leadership, and seek out symbols, meanings

and language which are distinct from the traditional institutions of the working

class such as trade unions and social democratic parties. What explains this

rejection of leadership? In order to offer an explanation, let us turn our

attention to the way their class position relates to wider trends on the macro-

level.

The Power of the Admin

The use of so-called networked technologies apparently renders centralised

leadership structures obsolete (Graeber, 2013; Mason, 2011). But based on my

research, social media and digital technologies have not rendered leadership

obsolete as network theorists such as Castells would have us believe (2012:5).

Instead we find new types of leadership, devoid of authority but based on the

interaction of relational practices and a skill-set of commanding digital

technologies and the media.

Southern European migrant activists might reject the kind of top-down

leadership prevalent in trade unions (Gall & Fiorito, 2012; Sadler, 2012) but

they nonetheless perform leadership functions through their activism and their

own initiatives. Since the advent of social media platforms such as Twitter and

Facebook, “taking initiative” has become far easier for activists. In some

ways, taking initiatives such as setting up an online event or demonstration

over Facebook requires a combination of the knowledge-based skills and

relational practices outlined in the previous section. While the framework of

40

“dialogical leadership” (Barker, 2001) is based on the skill of “active

listening” and responding adequately, this new type of digitally mediated

leadership requires us to rethink what constitutes a relational practice.

In one of our discussions Rafael, a Portuguese activist, recounted how he set

up a Facebook group for the first demonstration on 15 September 2014.

I received an email or Facebook message from Diana because there was

going to be a big demonstration on 15 September 2012. I created a

Facebook page… and we started distributing. We had more than 100

people turn up at the embassy.

Facebook required him to choose a name for the event. As the demonstrations

in Portugal were labelled Que Se Lixe a Troika (Screw the Troika), Rafael

chose London Contra a Troika. They “only mobilized through Facebook” for

first demonstration. Rodrigo commented that it was “a form of mobilization

that draws people in that otherwise would be scattered”. In effect, this

endowed Rafael with what communications scholar Marco Gerbaudo has

referred to as “the power of the Admin” (Gerbaudo, 2013). Here, Facebook

administrators or those Twitter users with many followers command new

types of power within social movements and organisations.

Katerina from Solidarity with the Greek Resistance has admin powers over

their Facebook page and was able to issue the call for the demonstration

following the murder of the Greek anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. Her

previous activism had equipped her with the tools to call a mobilization and

the necessary skills to command them. But this did not mean that starting a

Facebook event grants one the same kind of authority that a trade union

representative, for example, has. A similar type of leadership can be observed

41

within the Portuguese Migrantes Unidos group. Marco is one of the “power

users” on their discussion group, email lists. According to Rodrigo, “Marco

has been keeping it alive” by organising Doodle polls for scheduling events

and updating the Facebook presence of the group. However, Marco’s media-

savviness extends beyond the online realm. In the run-up to the event at

Passing Clouds, Marco managed to get jingles advertising the debate into

Portuguese community radio.

Rafael provides an explanation of this phenomenon:

Of course, there are leaders who emerge. Diana and I are very visible

because we started this through setting up social networks.

In the eyes of the activists, being visible or commanding a Facebook group or

email list is different from being a leader. It is mediated and symbolic. In

many ways, their arguments chime with Juris’s account of how the use of

different online media creates “horizontal” relationships between activists.

Dispersed activists from diverse ideological background can use the newest

digital technologies such as email lists and alternative networks of

communication and create a “cultural logic of networking” and “decentralized

organisational forms” (2008:15) with no centre or command structure.

However my online ethnography disclosed that it was those activists who were

“biographically available”, in jobs that permitted them to use the internet or

possessing the above outlined skills, that could take initiatives or dominate

discussions on email lists. Activists also developed forms of democracy on

Facebook and email lists through the use of Doodle polls and other

mechanisms. All of this speaks of a high degree of organisation and

inclusiveness, at levels which I had not experienced in my time as an activist.

42

Collective Intelligence

This inclusiveness allowed the Spanish activists, for example, to tap into their

real source of power – which Victor labelled the “collective intelligence”. This

collective intelligence emerged as the guiding principle among Spanish

activists camping outside the embassy in Belgrave Square. It was facilitated by

the organisational structures which activists had put in place. Unlike the

managerial paradigm of “distributed leadership” mentioned in the section

above, the notion of collective intelligence asserts leadership through

collective collaboration and synthesis. While it comes close to the notion of

“leaderful” (Occupy Research 2012), it is more than the inversion of

“leaderless” – and more honest, since it bases itself on collective learning

processes and the co-production of knowledge. Victor describes the way in

which individual self-transformation and collective learning processes

interrelated:

I learnt a lot of things though, I learnt about myself, the people, I assume

that this was part of the process: my personal process and the collective

process. The thing I really discovered in 15M, this was really one of the

big achievements of the process. It was what we call the development of

collective intelligence… Collective intelligence came out of Puerta de

Sol in Madrid. When you are in an assembly, you have this kind of

discussion process and you are trying to win votes. But many times you

wanted to talk in 15M you were put to the back, so by the time you

wanted to talk you had forgotten what to say, or completely changed

your mind. Maybe you add something. We were creating different

things, wielding something together with other people. Someone says

“let’s go into this direction” and you say “yes”… And you may. It

wasn’t something pre-set. It was something that we were discovering. In

my case, this process was absolutely amazing.

Anita reiterated a similar experience on a separate occasion:

Nobody is leading the trail of thinking. The decisions are first thought

through the group. Everyone can share their opinion. You don’t have to

compete for the right answer or the outcome… it is something which is built together. There is not a hierarchy. You consider step by step that

there is a collective process of thinking and you share that responsibility

43

as a group. You witness the whole process as a group. You don’t wait

for a person to take a decision. You are there together from the

beginning to the end.

The structures of working groups and commissions, which activists adopted

from the 15M movement in Spain, facilitated this collective intelligence.

Depending on what a movement participant was interested in they could join

or even start their own thematic working group. Anita, for example, was a

member of the arts and communications commission. It is not known exactly

how many working groups and commissions there were, but activists believe

there were around 20. The activists within them acted as a collective

intelligence on the given subject matter. This was facilitated by new

technologies which allowed multiple authors to work on documents and

statements at the same time. But it was also a product of the transient nature of

the group as Anita recalls:

Many people left the city… they came and went. What remained were

the core groups and commissions that helped new people to arrive to

integrate in these commissions.

In many ways, the structures even safeguarded against the emergence of

individual leaders within the 15M movement in London. “Moderatores” and

“facilidatores” volunteered on a rotational basis. The former would facilitate

the discussion while the latter would read participants’ body language and

check the flow of communication within the assembly. This meant that

individuals could not dominate by rhetoric. Claudia describes this:

There are always informal leaderships. This is inevitable but I don’t

think it’s because of the lack of formal structures. It’s human nature.

Some people have more outgoing personalities, or manipulative

personalities, or clear agendas, even in an unconscious way. But

collectively we always managed to, if not neutralise, tackle those

attempts to concentrate power in one way or another.

44

Thinking about leadership in times of leaderlessness in terms of collective

intelligence represents a way to transcend the leadership/leaderlessness

dichotomy present in many of the discussions on this topic. In many ways, it is

a superior framework to the notion of “leaderfulness”, given that it is attached

to practices and skills, and represents an immediate solution to some of the

issues activists encountered with people coming and going, and emergent

leaders within the movement. Although as Claudia points out, it does not solve

all issues with individuals who do assume roles within groups.

The following example from the Portuguese group London Contra A Troika

(now Migrantes Unidos) provides a good overview how individuals assume

leadership functions within organisations that not only reject formal

committee structures but the very idea of leaders.

Liquid Leadership

We want democracy and not a leader to follow. People are really afraid

of giving someone power. If you have elected leaders you have

representation and that is not welcome. But you do have leaders in the

sense that are acting. But it is fluid or jelly leadership… you have a

liquid leadership of the people who are willing and able to.

Marco’s description above of leadership within Migrantes Unidos illuminates

how a group which rejects leaders can nevertheless make sense of how

leadership operates in a practical way. Leadership emerges inside this group

on the basis of an ad hoc rotation system between different activists,

depending on who has time (biographical availability) and who is motivated.

The notion of ‘liquid leadership’ appears to have its roots in the open source

community and digital rights activism, which Marco previously belonged to.

45

While a google search does not yield any significant results along those lines,

it is necessary to state that the Pirate Party calls its form of democratic

decision-making ‘liquid democracy’.

“Liquid leadership” highlights to what extent different people assumed

leadership functions at different times, yet continued play key roles throughout

the whole wave of mobilization, contemplation and organisation. The model

of “liquid leadership” functioned well given the group’s continued reference to

the Que Se Lixe a Troika movement in Portugal, and its continued openness to

other activists. Yet despite this liquid model, clashes arose within the group

during their co-operation with PIIGS Uncut in the run-up to the TUC

demonstration on 20 October 2012. The problem with this type of “liquid

leadership” is the issue of scale. But not only. The Pirate Party’s liquid

democracy - a mix of representative and direct democracy – favours those

those who spend the most time in this process and have the most expertise

quickly come to dominate it, as intra-organisational quarrels have highlighted

(Bergfeld, 2012; Bieber, 2012).

While it provides small groups which reject leadership a way to solve the issue

practically, leaderships remain generally frowned upon. However, social

movement researchers and trade union scholars could learn a lot from thinking

about intra-organisational forms of leadership in these terms. While rotation

systems are nothing new to labour and social movements, the way of

conceptualising them offers a way of understanding leadership as a set of tasks

which are necessary to progress one’s cause. This is confirmed by Katerina

who described a similar process within the network We Are All Greeks (since

renamed Solidarity with the Greek Resistance). The fact that leadership was

46

liquid within the group helped less experienced activists and movement

participants to access leadership.

You can see in the process that people who were not active in the past

got empowered and took leadership themselves, took opportunities and

became leaders within that core group of people. How long it lasted is

another thing to discuss. But I can identify two, three, four people with

no concrete political background, ideology – and with time they got into

and undertook things to do, speaking freely and feeling more

comfortable.

Again, Katerina speaks about a small number of people. Yet in discussions

with activists there was a riddle when you compared how they spoke about

their intra-organisational dynamics with the way they spoke about leadership

at large. The notion of liquid leadership also highlights the way that these

activists create their own theorisations independent from academic discourse,

and thus engaged in the process of theory co-production. The following

chapter turns its attention as to why the forms of trade union and other forms

of leadership are rejected.

47

The Roots of Leaderlessness

This chapter analyses the socio-economic and political roots of

“leaderlessness”. In so doing, it seeks to understand why these Southern

European activists, in particular, reject leadership and seek to establish

alternative practices and models within their own organisations.

Crisis of Authority

What they call leadership is in fact some kind of dictatorship. People are

used to giving their opinions at home, in school, on Facebook etc. But

the idea that you have elections every four years and vote a

representative every four years is a thing of the past. It shows that their

democracy isn’t working. (Victor, his emphasis)

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the ensuing financial

meltdown and economic crisis have had an immediate impact on the

legitimacy of governing parties across Europe. Since 2008, some 17 national

governments in the EU have collapsed or been voted out of power, 12 of them

members of the eurozone. Their political legitimacy waned as they could no

longer promise high growth rates, low inflation, low unemployment and rising

standards of living for the majority of the population. The Portuguese

politician Rafael Louca branded this a “regime crisis” (Louca, 2013), while

others speak of a “political crisis” (Lapavitsas, 2012). However both notions

fail to account for the socio-economic, political and cultural dimension of the

on-going crisis.

The Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci spoke rather of a “crisis of

authority” (Gramsci, 1971:210). This crisis of authority manifests itself first

and foremost in a crisis of bourgeois leadership, and a rejection of that

48

leadership as outlined by Victor above. The hegemonic class can no longer

legitimate itself in the same manner and needs to move to other methods of

rule (such as authoritarianism) or seeks to relegitimise itself in new ways. The

fact that all governing parties – whether social democrat or conservative –

have sought to balance budgets by cutting public service provision and

infrastructure has exacerbated this crisis of authority. Instead of articulating a

vision which can provide leadership for society as a whole, the dominant class

appears to be in the grips of the financial elites.

Gramsci writes:

If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” but

only “dominant”, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely

that the great masses have become detached from their traditional

ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously,

etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the

new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid

symptoms appear. (Gramsci 1971:275-276)

The slogans “Que se vayan todos!” (“They all have to go!”) and “Democracia

real ya!” (“Real democracy now!”) which echoed from the mass

demonstrations, encampments and assemblies across the Spanish state in May

2011 have come to exemplify how the popular classes have reacted to the

crisis of authority in more recent years. Not only do they reject the hegemonic

class’s austerity agenda, they also reject their former representative organs

such as social democratic parties and trade unions. Gramsci pointed out that

the crisis of authority lies precisely in “the particular men who constitute,

represent, and lead [the working classes], are no longer recognised by their

class (or fraction of a class) as its expression.” (Gramsci 1971:210). As a

consequence, the PSOE lost more than two million working class votes in

Spain. But even in countries less effected by the crisis, social democratic

49

parties have suffered. In Britain, the Labour Party’s estimated membership

figures are down to nearly 190,000 (McGuinness, 2012) and the German SPD

suffered a significant split which led to the creation of the Left Party – Die

Linke – now the third strongest party in German parliament, with seats in the

majority of federal states. This is paralleled by the steady decline in trade

union membership, the erosion of bargaining rights across Europe and the UK

(McCartin, 2011; Hencke & Evans, 2010; Visser, 2006). The following quotes

from Southern European activists in London highlight the aversion to trade

unions as institutions of worker representation:

I would not join a trade union. I don’t believe in trade unions. I respect

their work, especially the one they did up to 30 years ago but I don’t

think they are adequate. (Claudia)

The trade unions are similar to the political parties. There is little

difference. They aren’t doing anything worthwhile for workers.

Obviously, I would prefer to have bad trade unions than no trade unions.

(Victor)

Hence the social theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that people

across Europe no longer accept “the principle of representation” (Hardt &

Negri, 2012). Previously incorporated sectors of the popular classes now find

themselves economically excluded by sluggish economic growth, recurring

financial crises and a permanent state of austerity, while failing to be

represented by social democratic parties and trade unions. The consequence is

pure and simple rejection and an emergence of a new kind of politics in the

making.

50

Acting out of Affect

The crisis of authority and its ensuing disappointment with traditional working

class institutions facilitates “a great variety of morbid symptoms” as the

Gramsci put it, or a new type of affective politics. This type of politics is a

symptom of the failings of social democracy and trade unionism. As yet, it is

not capable of asserting an alternative set of organisational practices and

vision of leadership. It remains tied to practices, feelings and actions at an

instinctive level.

EP Thompson highlighted the importance of acting out of affect in his analysis

if the English bread riots in the 1700s. He writes that “an outrage to these

moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation; was the usual

occasion for direct action”. In turn the rioters turned to instincts “more

elementary than politics” (1971:77) which “cannot be described as ‘political’

in any advanced sense, nevertheless it cannot be described as unpolitical

either, since it supposed definite, and passionately held, notions of the

common weal” (1971:79). By no means are the Southern European activists

acting out of sheer deprivation. But faced with a crisis of authority and no

voice to articulate their needs, they rely on their instincts.

I would never consider joining a British trade union because I am disappointed… I have

received help from them. In that moment, I started to look at trade unions in a different

way… but all in all I have been disappointed. (Anita)

Petros criticized the dominance of affective politics within the various

Southern European migrant initiatives and platforms. He lamented that “these

51

movements were purely based on sentiments… a less politicized environment

clearly not of the left”. This dominance of affect and instincts among Southern

European migrants bears dangers. Affective politics could be manipulated by

the right. I myself witnessed a number of Portuguese and Greek flags flown

and nationalist chanting at respective demonstrations in the earlier days in

2011 and 2012. Katerina, one of the Greek activists, recounts:

At the very first demonstrations people were coming with Greek flags

being very patriotic and very chauvinistic arguments and chants. We

discussed with them. These weren’t people from the left, they were

people worried about the situation in Greece. They were all very

interested in getting involved.

And Rodrigo tells a similar story from the first Portuguese protests at the

embassy:

There was a lack of an agenda, a political agenda. At the beginning,

there was a lot of ambiguity politically. You had people turning up,

coming up with a lot of nationalist chants… There were moments in the

first but also in the second demonstration where a lot of the most left-

oriented people were left feeling awkward because of the chants were

almost right wing in tone.

As a consequence of continuous right wing presence on the demonstrations

outside the Greek embassy in Holland Park, the activists from Solidarity with

the Greek Resistance invited Turkish immigrants and left wing activists from

the Day-Mer organisation to address the crowd. That initiative was successful

in undercutting the affective nationalism. Yet even among the most politically

minded activists, affect continues to play a large role. This is partially

explicable insofar that leading activists such as Marco and Anita did not

consider themselves activists in their home countries of Portugal and Spain.

52

Yet also those who had previously been active frequently defined their

activism through affect throughout the interviews

We were inspired by people on the streets. It happened because we felt

touched and we just wanted to go. (Anita)

I was going to demonstrations in Madrid but I wasn’t a radical person. I

lived in my comfortable zone. Until 2003 I believed… yeah

democracy… everything is working. The moment that changed was in

2003 with the Iraq war. That was the turning point when I felt

disappointed with the social democrats. I wasn’t happy and my green

activism started becoming much more political, I became much more

aware of other things. The paradise after World War II was no longer

reality. (Victor)

You hear the news that something important is happening in Greece and

then you want to demonstrate. You just want to do something about it.

(Katerina)

Affective politics then remains undefined in content, open to manipulation,

and ultimately a symptom of the crisis of authority. It closes itself off from

developing strategy, the process of leadership formation and any focus on

changing policy. Arguably it also closes itself off from the possibility of

changing social and power relations (Hardt & Negri, 2012:37). This new type

of politics mean that Victor’s activism in Greenpeace and a Marxist

description of his “class consciousness” no longer contradict one another but

can live happily side by side. It means that there is no perceived problem with

Claudia’s engagement with European Greens of London and her insistence on

not “want[ing] to be in collectives with a clear mandate or clear purpose”.

However, Rafael presciently observes the downside to this new politics based

on affect:

Some people want to be completely pure, and detached from any

affiliation from anything, which in the end is the negation of activism.

The collective expectation of staying pure, fluid, leaderless, uncorrupted

is in some ways “pointless” [laughs].

53

This type of rejection means that activism first and foremost centres in on

oneself. Self-transformation – “be the change you want to see in the world” –

is the prime objective of this type of engagement. At one point, Victor stressed

the importance of Stephane Hessel’s pamphlet Enragez-vous! However, a

closer look reveals that this has a lot to do with anarchism’s influence on

contemporary social movements.

No gods, no masters, no leaders?

While Colin Barker traces the anti-leadership discourses back to the

“ideologies of spontaneity” and the New Left in the 1960s (Barker, 2001),

today’s anti-leadership discourses are firmly rooted in a new anarchist

tradition which has emerged since the advent of the global justice movement.

At the height of the alter-globalization movement in 2002, David Graeber

wrote a piece for the New Left Review titled ‘The new anarchists’. In the

piece Graeber distinguished between ‘Anarchists’ with a capital A and

‘anarchists’ with a lower case a. While the former clung on to a small group

mentality and an obsolete notion of revolutionary purity, the latter, Graeber

argued, had become the backbone of the new anti-capitalist movements which

were born out of protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle

1999. He argued that “by 2001… a new, open-ended pragmatic anarchism was

emerging as the spiritual centre of the revolutionary left" (Graeber, 2012:425).

Virgina confirms this:

For us Spanish, there is a strong anarchist tradition even for those of us

who don’t call or label themselves anarchist. People are quite used to

self-organisation. For a Spaniard organising a group of Spanish migrants

in the context of Britain, there is always a contrast, a different way of

organising, because there are more hierarchies here than in activism in

Spain.

54

Arguably even those who did not agree with anarchist ideology per se, such as

the majority of the Southern European activists in question, had adopted

anarchism’s horizontal, decentralised, leaderless and direct action-oriented

forms of political activism. This was not, however, the type of activism put

forward by anarchist groups such as CrimethInc, or even the Black Bloc.

Instead, the roots of this “small a” anarchism was to be found in the

movements of the Global South, such as the uprising of the indigenous

peoples of Chiapas, Mexico, under the banner of the EZLN, and the piqueteros

movement in Argentina which appeared in the wake of the economic collapse

in 2001. Closer to home, the German and Italian autonomist and “spontaneist”

movements that flourished between the late 1960s and 1980s are hailed as

another of the new anarchism’s influences. Graeber explains the principles

behind this development:

This is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to

organisation. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not

lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It

is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down

structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on

principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy.

Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately it

aspires to reinvent daily life as whole. (Graeber, 2002:70).

Based on Graeber's assertion that “those new forms of organization are its

ideology” (decentralised, horizontal, leaderless, and so on) I argue that these

Southern European activists do not define themselves by their ideological

coherence or ideals which aim towards a pre-defined objective. Instead they

define themselves through their organizational practices, which aim to create a

culture of encounter which has been largely eradicated from everyday life

under neoliberalism. This culture of encounter is marked by a strong rejection

of any kind of leadership. As Victor puts it:

55

The 15M movement is a horizontal movement with no specific

leadership, and no special projection to have a leadership inside of the

movement.

Throughout all the discussions “leaderlessness” was often treated as an ideal,

something that activists were striving toward rather than an actually existing

state. This meant that without the notion of activism or collective self-activity

one could not understand how leadership functions, or the way that these

activists can possibly be viewed as new (collective) leadership within their

wider migrant communities, or even in some cases in their local trade union

branches and social movement organisations.

56

The Leadership Function of Southern European Activists

Southern European activists might reject the traditional leadership of trade

unions and social democratic parties. However, by rejecting these models of

leadership, they constitute a new form of leadership both within the trade

unions and their local migrant communities. Problems continue to prevail, but

learning processes among activists show that this “class fraction in the

making” is forced to perform a leadership function due to on-going crisis of

authority.

… in the trade unions?

If these activists are part of a larger “class fraction in the making”, it is

important to understand how they make sense of the crisis of authority, and of

existing working class institutions and their participation within them or

rejection thereof. This will allow us to understand whether they function as

emergent “leaders” within the trade union movement, or if not, what inhibits

them from accessing leadership.

In recent years, industrial relations scholars have debated to what extent

organising campaigns among low paid migrants (Mustchin, Martinez &

Perrett, 2009; Frege & Kelly, 2003:9) have been successful in rebuilding trade

unions. Especially in the US, community organising and labour-community

organisations have been successful in integrating migrants into organising

efforts over low pay, poor working conditions, housing etc. These have been

geographically and sectorally limited as well as dependent upon strong ties

inside the community – mostly provided by churches, home associations or

57

media outlets such as community radio stations. Worker centres have provided

migrants with a safe space outside of work in which they could organise both

formally and informally around a number of issues (Choudry & Thomas; Yu

2013). Churches played a similar function for the Haitian community in

Boston (Yu, 2013). In the German media there have been reports of how many

young Greeks' first stop has been the Greek Orthodox Church when arriving in

Germany. This strand of literature can only partially answer how trade unions

can make sense of the activism of Southern European migrants as a “class

fraction in the making”.

Other organising efforts on behalf of trade unions might facilitate a better

understanding of how trade unions have sought to come to grips with new

methods of contention and new forms of public, social and political

engagement, such as those displayed by Southern European migrant activists

in London. There are growing similarities between social movements and

trade unions in the way in which they seek to mobilise their members. This

cross-fertilisation between social movements and trade unions has been

examined by Sherman & Voss who propose a “transfer of methods of

campaigning” (Sherman & Voss, 2000). Moody’s proposition for a social

movement unionism stands in the same vein (Moody, 1997). In the case study

of the relationship between civil society organizations and trade unions in the

UK, Heery et al observe that there is not one dominant pattern but rather a

complex web of relationships which encompass cooperation, conflict and

indifference (Heery et al, 2012). Thus it is all the more important to

understand and to work together with these groups to analyse the relationship

between social movements and trade unions. Social movement organisations

58

are sometimes seen as competitors to trade unions and often their interests are

seen as opposed to them. Heery et al write that “the interests of CSOs and

trade unions are orthogonal, resulting in a relationship of indifference and

limited contact, a possibility that is rarely discussed” (2012:146).

While Southern European activists do not outright reject trade unions, they are

hesitant to participate or engage with them. The line of argument does not,

however, follow a traditional left wing critique of corporatism vis-à-vis

service unionism or its sectoral emphasis. Instead activists address trade

unions’ inherent “bureaucratism” which leads them to be slow to act, as well

as criticising their “economism”. These two factors can help us understand the

rejection of trade union leadership, as well as giving an insight into why

participants seek to divert their activism and access leadership roles outside of

trade unions. Interestingly, those who are active in trade unions as well as their

new migrant organisations share the same criticisms of unions.

Katerina recounts some of the problems that she has encountered within her

own UCU branch:

In a structured environment like the UCU it’s very rigid, very stiff. You

cannot do much. But I will definitely use it as a means to mobilize

members and its massive appeal it has to people. I am going to use it

when it suits me as an activist but when it is not that active and right-

wing and conservative like now.

The discontent with the UCU’s bureaucratism becomes more obvious when

asked about what trade unions could learn from her activism and

contemporary social movements.

UCU has very formalised procedures but it is rooted in the working class

for many years. I have a hard time. I didn’t have much experience of

being in a trade union and now I am an official of the UCU and

59

especially in this country where UCU is very conservative from my

point of view, and it’s so bureaucratic and difficult to take advantage of

the momentum like in social movements. For something to happen it has

to be discussed on all these different levels, and you have to write all

these different levels. It’s very bureaucratic and doesn’t give you this

flexibility, and it is difficult to mobilize people and use the momentum.

There are issues but in the time that it could be done. People are upset

and want to do something and then it takes months and months to call a

strike and when we strike it’s useless and doesn’t affect anything. People

are demoralised or discouraged. So I think I am not a very good

representative because I am not very patient.

I am trying to find issues that mobilize people, and that people are angry

about. Two or three weeks ago I organised a stall with the UCU. People

don’t even do that at this university, trying to use my experience as an

activist to have a petition and collect signatures. Everyone was against it

here in UCU. People said “no one is going give their telephone or email

to be contacted… no one wants their name out there.” But people were

happy to do so… so I contacted the students union to discuss the issue of

pay with them. But no one has done this and no one will ever do cause

they do it differently here, dealing with trade union issues.

Rafael, who also is a member of the UCU, highlights some of the problems

with the so-called “transfer of methods”. Asked about whether he had brought

in any of the experiences made with London Contra a Troika into the union,

he replied “not at all”, adding “it is a bit like two separate worlds even though

the worlds are quite connected given the precariousness”. His account of the

recent pay dispute in the universities highlights further problems:

A one day strike is a completely pointless thing in my perspective. No

point in it at all. There’s no point in stopping classes for one day because

there’s no production which is going to stop and we are not going to

assert our value in this general process of creation of value here by not

giving lectures… But I suppose if we get people here and get them out

to stop this process by giving lectures outside, creating an alternative

university, that kind of thing – that would make much more sense.

Katerina on the other hand, stated:

I do carry the little experience I have from being an activist in Greece

into the way I organize things in the UCU. I am now the chair of my

local campus branch. I could bring the experience of what is happening

in the universities but not really… I mentioned [my activism with

Solidarity with the Greek Resistance] once but I mainly discuss about

university-related issues and national issues. I think you should make the issue because the root of the problem after all is international but I am

more interested in doing something as a worker in this country and

60

contribute in this way which is also going to have an effect

internationally hopefully rather than be a projector of the Greek issue in

UCU.

Katerina and Rafael’s experience reveal the difficulty of transplanting one’s

experience in social movements and activism into the workplace. This begs

the question whether the skills required to access leadership in trade unions are

different, or whether the conception of leaderships (top down versus collective

or horizontal) are contradictory rather than complementary. Even when trade

unions mobilize, problems persist. Victor states that it is not necessarily the

methods of campaigning but rather the persistent economism of trade unions

which caused problems in the run up to the TUC demonstration on 20 October

2012.

British trade union far more interested in economics. There was the

assumption that democracy works, whereas for us it was directed against

the political system. We want to reinvent society. For them it was

economic problems. We have “neoliberal agenda”, “tax evasion”,

“tuition fees”.

Despite prevailing problems between social movement activists and trade

unions, these activists are quite possibly the trade unionists and backbone of

the labour movement of tomorrow. Pancho, who now lives in Berlin, has

shown that it is possible to reinvigorate the local trade union movement. After

he left London and headed for Berlin in the hope for a better job, he started the

15M SAG, a worker action group helping Spanish migrants with workplace

issues. So far they have recruited more than 40 people to the service union

Verdi. Their initiative has been welcomed in the German and Spanish press. It

necessitates a study in its own right.

61

The learning processes and leadership formation within this “class fraction in

the making” remain unfinished. While their affective politics, individualism

and “habitual mobility” seem to prolong this process of leadership formation,

they nonetheless are making strides forward as exemplified by Anita’s

comment:

After a long conversation we understood that this was a different culture

with different political traditions and particularly the trade unions. And it

was interesting for us. We had to be flexible. In Spain, trade unions have

that reputation that is bad. But the movement here in UK has its own

particularities. It was a good opportunity to learn.

Some of these steps forward have been made within their own respective

migrant communities.

… in their communities?

In this section I argue that these Southern European activists function as

“brokers” (Diani, 2003) between different social groups. The Greek activists

of Solidarity with the Greek Resistance, for example, function as brokers

between the migrant community and the local trade union movement. The

Migrantes Unidos collectively acts as a broker between an older generation of

migrants and the newly arrived migrants, though that has not been without

difficulties. The Spanish 15M activists saw themselves occupying a similar

space.

According to Claudia:

We were hoping that we would be that bridge between the migrant

communities and the local indigenous movements. That’s how we

envisioned ourselves but we didn’t not succeed because we didn’t

manage to mobilise those who don’t want to be mobilised. I think what

we ended up doing instead bringing in the perspective of the migrant in

the UK movement, and call for an activism which is truly transnational

62

rather than just “British workers in solidarity with Greek workers”

which is a bit like bilateral aid.

In so doing, they established themselves as a reliable coalition partner for

different actions. The online ethnography revealed that 15M activists

supported the latest People’s Assembly demonstrations on 21 June 2014 and

the day of action against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

(TTIP), both of which have links to trade unions. However, at a time when

neoliberalism continues to erode remaining social links, bonds of solidarity

and the “principle of community” the function that the campaign Solidarity

with the Greek Resistance is playing might actually contribute to the

formation of a leadership capable of realigning coalitions between social

movement organisations, migrant communities and trade unions. This is a

particularly urgent task given the apolitical nature of existing Greek cultural

and community organisations in London. Katerina recounts:

No one is trying to use social events to organize something, or use them

as political. When it comes to bouzouki everyone forgets about politics.

I remember when an activist and trade unionist from Justice for Cleaners

said: “There’s a cleaner strike at SOAS and we should all come down

with instruments and play and show solidarity.” But everyone just got up

and left as they were drunk. These types of Greeks are a different kind.

The organisational network of newly arrived Greek migrants highlights the

role that Solidarity with the Greek Resistance has played in developing

campaigns, responding to events, building coalitions with other civil society

and social movement organisations. But you can also see that it is a politically

volatile situation in which different political parties of the left such as Syriza

and Antarsya seek to build London branches and solidify a membership. It

appears that this hampers Greek activists such as Katerina in their ability to

63

play a broker role between the migrant community and the local trade union

movement.

Migrantes Unidos, on the other hand, has sought to broker between together

two sections of the Portuguese migrant community. It seeks to bring together

those migrants which arrived in the wake of the crisis and ones who have been

here for up to a decade. According to Marco they are in touch with the older

community based in Vauxhall and Stockwell in South London:

But they are more organised around folklore, cultural and sporting

associations. There have been some political movements from the old

part of the Portuguese community. Some are conservative, others are

more associated with social democrats… There isn’t much political

engagement from older community. But the younger generation is more

politicized than the previous ways. That makes the contact between old

and new generation is not straightforward

Rodrigo confirms this:

A dilemma we had from the very beginning of the first demonstrations is

that two very distinct groups turned up, the classical older working class

64

immigrants and the younger urban generation. That was very interesting.

That was the split in the very first demonstration… The older ones are

more energetic, more committed to do things, but they are not

comfortable in the context of political discussion. The younger ones are

far more at ease in these situations and dominate as they are more

educated, but subjectively they are less committed. They are

depoliticized in that sense despite being better equipped to deal with it.

The older ones are more inclined, less equipped.

This echoes the problem elaborated in the Preface and remains an issue for

these newly arrived Southern European activists. The question is whether

these activists can assume the role of the brokers between a new generation

and older generation which struggles to access leadership in changed

circumstances.

65

Conclusion

The analysis and results presented in this dissertation highlight one particular

facet of the intersection of crisis, migration and social movements. It is a

starting point for further inquiry into this field which will remain of academic

importance as long as the crisis remains unresolved, and migration from

Southern Europe to Northern Europe is seen as the an adequate response to

youth unemployment. Different lines of inquiry are necessary to complete the

picture of this class fraction in the making. This could possibly entail studies

around the notion of “mobility”.

As can be seen the issues of leadership and “leaderlessness” provides a much

overlooked fault line from which a conceptual, analytical and practical

complexities and contradictions arise. This project’s focus on this particular

fault line does not only reveal insights about this particular group of activists

at hand. It raises issues in relation to the study of leadership, social movements

and trade union renewal.

This study has fundamental implications for the study of leadership in trade

union and social movements in so far that it underlines that the notion of

activism is closely intertwined with the performance of leadership. Activists

take up tasks, learn skills, engage in relational practices, create symbols and

meanings, and interpret the world around them. Often they do all of these at

the same time, or at least within the same process of contention. In so doing,

they assume leadership, or perform a leadership function regardless of whether

they are part of a committee or formalised structure, regardless of whether

they call their movements “leaderless” or “leaderfull”. This raises the question

66

whether the current state of research which focuses on one factor rather than

the interplay of skills and practices is superseded, or too one-dimensional.

Among other examples in my dissertation project, the notion of “the power of

the admin” (Gerbaudo, 2013) and my interviews help us to rethink the process

of leadership formation at a time when Facebook and Twitter play such a large

role in activism. In this context, leadership is neither a technologically-

determinist skill nor simply a relational ‘dialogical’ practice. It requires both

the command of technological skills and an understanding and engagement in

digitally-mediated relational practices. But even non-mediated forms of

leadership cannot be explained by one determining factor, as some would like

us to believe. At current, biographical availability is over-emphasized. The

activists in this study however show that motivation, ideals and political

values facilitate a different kind of leadership when leadership structures are

non-existent.

The overlapping typologies of leadership which I discover among Southern

European activists show that ‘leadership’ is a process of formation and

negotiation and cannot be treated in the same way in which social movement

researchers seek to make sense of social movements and their policy

outcomes, for example. Yet, social movement research has not employed

research methodologies which are congruent with the study of leadership.

In my attempt to further develop activist research, the task is remains to refuse

any kind of analytical closure and rather concentrate on the importance of new

forms of knowledge and theory co-production. The collaborative effort which

I have displayed in this project is a small step in that direction. The focus and

67

attention to activists’ own sense making allows me to treat their ad-hoc

theorisations of “collective intelligence” and “liquid leadership” as equivalent

to theories and notions developed within the confines of academia. Without

having participated in the same activities, however, I would have not been able

to decipher the meanings, symbols and repertoires of their actions, let alone,

understand how academic discourses such as ‘dialogical leadership’ do not

resonate among some activists.

One possible reason is that the issue of leadership in social movements and

trade unions has too frequently been divorced from its social-political trends

and economic roots which I describe in this project. These help to understand

activists’ situated activity and ideological predispositions not simply as a

novel form of idealism, but materially grounded.

Their experiences precarious migrants at a time of economic and social crisis

exacerbates the rejection of leadership. However, it would be dishonest to

claim that this rejection of leadership is a permanent feature of this new social

strata, or rather a transient one. As this group of people continues to grow,

either integrate or be marginalised new questions and fault lines will arise.

However for the purpose of our study it is fair to argue that existing trade

unions and social movement organisations such as the Coalition of Resistance,

for example, have to adapt their repertoires of contention to these new forms

of collectivity/individualism. As a consequence, they also need to think about

how to develop new forms of collective leadership these activists demand

from their civic, social and political engagement. Hereby, Gramsci’s crisis of

authority raises the question whether it is the current form and content of

leadership which is rejected rather than leadership all together.

68

Do “leaderless” movements have a future, or are they a transient phenomenon

of a particular political conjuncture? As long as leadership remains associated

with grey-haired white men in backrooms, and Marxist-Leninist central

committees, a new generation of activists will continue to reject the notion all

together. However this study clarifies that leaderless movements are more of

an ideal than the real existing or de facto practice of these movements. Their

leaderless character safeguards against the worst excesses found in trade

unions, political parties and other institutions. As a matter of fact, these

activists are reconfiguring the culture and politics of these organisations by

their rejection.

This dissertation project raises many more questions than it answers. It will

remain a collective effort to understand and analyse the intersection of crisis,

migration and social movements as long as:

“We [Southern European migrants –my insertion] serve English breakfast,

we take care of lovely blond toddlers, we clean hotels, we make wraps, we

learn English twice a week, we memorize phrasal verbs, we work far-away,

we live in overcrowded houses in North London. We say “have a nice day

Sir” and on the phone we lie to our mum’s telling them that everything is

alright. But none of these things seem to be enough for Nigel Farage the

UKIP leader and he feels uncomfortable sitting on a train hearing us

speak foreign languages. I am sure he is fluent in several languages. I am

sure he serves coffees at 8 o’clock in the morning and cleans his own office!

Farage, Merkel, Rajoy and other political figures blame immigrants for the

crisis. But I would ask these leaders: Have us immigrants caused over six

million unemployed in the Spanish state? Did we impose these austerity

plans that are not working, that are making the working class poorer and

poorer. Why are we being robbed of a future?”- a female Spanish migrant

activist of Podemos at a solidarity meeting

69

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74

Appendix 1: Glossary of Organisations

15-M London

Activists in the Spanish State called for a demonstration on 15 May 2011. This

mobilization would come to be known as the 15-M movement with

decentralized autonomous groups of Spanish migrants adopting the label

across Europe and North America. At the peak in May/June 2011 more than

500 people participate in assemblies. Today, there remain more than 20

working groups and commissions.

More: https://twitter.com/15mlondon

Coalition of Resistance

A coalition of social movement groups, trade unions and community

organisations that mobilized for the anti-austerity demonstrations by the Trade

Union Congress (TUC). They also build strong links with anti-austerity

movements in different European countries such as Greece, and organised

1200-strong Europe Against Austerity Conference in London. More:

http://coalitionofresistance.wordpress.com/

Greek Solidarity Campaign

A solidarity campaign with Greece initiated by the Coalition of Resistance. It

is led by British trade unionists and campaigners. It has close ties to SYRIZA.

More: http://greecesolidarity.org/

Juventud Sin Futuro

A group of anti-capitalist youth activists who were active within the 15-M

movement and known for their dominance within some of the encampments

following the first demonstration on May 15, 2011.

London Contra A Troika

A group of Portuguese artists, public figures and intellectuals called for a

demonstration under the banner ‘Que Se Lixe A Troika’ (Screw the Troika)

on 15 September 2012. Initially conceived to hold a demonstration on the

same, London Contra A Troika organised a mobilization outside the

75

Portuguese embassy on the same day. They continued to mobilise young and

newly-arrived Portuguese migrants in London. More than 200 people

participated in the demonstrations in September 2012 and March 2013.

Marea Granate Londres

After the momentum of the 15-M movement receded, Spanish activists

decided to organise in different ‘waves’ (mareas). Each wave organized

around the defence of one public service such as health or education. The

Marea Granate organised Spanish migrants in many parts of the world. It

gained national and international prominence when they organised the ‘Nos

nos vamos! Nos echan’ (We’re not leaving! They’re kicking us out!)

demonstration on April 7, 2013. The group does not have a defined

membership but commands 6,523 Twitter followers (08/2014). More:

https://twitter.com/15mlondon

Migrantes Unidos

After the Troika of the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund

and European Commission officially ‘left’ Portugal, the activists of London

Contra A Troika decided to rename themselves. Today they seek to organise

both newly-arrived and an older generation of Portuguese migrants as well as

migrants of other backgrounds. They have 348 members in their Facebook

group. More than 50 people attended the debate on European citizenship in

May 2014. More: https://www.facebook.com/groups/migrantsunited/

People’s Assembly Against Austerity

A new organisation initiated by trade unions, the Coalition of Resistance and

other campaigners such as Owen Jones and Mark Steel. It has held its own

anti-austerity demonstrations. More: http://www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/

PIIGS

A derogatory word coined by the Financial Times and Barclays Capital to

define the debtor economies in the Eurozone

76

PIIGS Uncut

An initiative by 15-M London which brought together Spanish, Portuguese,

Greek and even Irish anti-austerity campaigners. They mobilized for the TUC

demonstration on October 20, 2012. It was loosely organised in which the

different groups maintained their autonomy. The campaign constituted a point

of consolidation as disperse actors came together and mobilised for larger

demonstration. More: https://www.facebook.com/groups/124402811042587/

Solidarity with the Greek Resistance

A group of anti-capitalist activists associated with the radical left coalition

SYRIZA and ANTARSYA yet politically independent. They organised

fundraising events for the occupied ERT news station, for example, and have

initiated demonstrations outside the Greek embassy in Holland Park, London.

Their Facebook group has more than 1,212 likes (08/2014).

More: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Solidarity-with-the-Greek-

Resistance/261583060586182?sk=info

TUC

Trade Union Congress. The apex organization of British trade unions with

more than 7 million affiliate members. More: www.tuc.org.uk

We are all Greeks (London)

A Facebook group which called for demonstrations in Trafalgar Square,

London. These demonstrations coincided with the square occupation of the

‘Indignant Citizens’ Movement’ in Greece in June 2011. Some of the

demonstrations attracted up to 500 people. The Facebook group still

commands 893 members (08/2014). More:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/174336339346493/

77

Appendix 2: Biographical Sketches

Petros (27) had been a member of the anti-capitalist student organisation

EAAK back at his university in Athens. He was also a member of Antarsya, a

left-wing electoral project focusing on Greece’s exit from euro. In 2010, he

moved to the UK to further his studies in Economics at the University of

Manchester where he became involved in the UK student movement and

started a group to “bring the Greek community together”. It had little

affiliation to other organisations except for local activists. After graduating he

moved to London where he was jobless for more than six months before

working for as a researcher in a think-tank. After his six months contract

ended he was jobless for some time. He then moved to Bruxelles where he

worked in policy for another six months. After some more months of

unemployment, he headed back to Greece. He now serves in the military in

Thessaloniki, Greece.

Katerina (31) is a lecturer at a post-1992 university in London. She has been

working there, on the South Coast as well as in London. She has been on one-

year contracts, the austerity measures, the lack of funding at UK Universities

have made it difficult for her to finish her PhD and be as politically active at

the same time. As a member of ANTARSYA UK she was one of the the

initiators of the Solidarity with the Greek Resistance. Back in Greece she has

participated in a neighbourhood committee against the IMF’s visit to

Thessaloniki, and stood as a candidate in local council elections.

Rafael is a researcher at the University of London. He describes himself as

precarious worker. Back in Portugal he had not been a member of any other

political organisation, trade union, NGO etc. He had been to demonstrations

in his role as the Vice-President of his local Students’ Union. He set up the

Facebook event ‘London Contra A Troika’. He went over to Portugal to meet

with others and build the link between the Portuguese groups and the London

group.

Victor (31) first came to London when he was sixteen years of age. He wanted

to improve his English. After he finished his studies in Madrid and the crisis

hit Spain, he came back to the UK again. When I first met Victor in 2011, he

was working in a cinema in Central London. He had many jobs in the

meantime. During our last encounter he was working as a teaching assistant in

a school during the week and in a bike shop on the weekends so to pay the

rent. Due to his work contract he spends his summers back in Spain. For many

years, he was an environmental campaigner with Greenpeace before becoming

a key activist in the 15-M movement.

78

Anita is a qualified art therapist. When we last spoke she had just quit working

for a patisserie in London, and was looking for a new job. Back in Spain she

previously had been involved with an AIDS/HIV charity. Here in London, she

plays a prominent role in the Spanish-English feminist campaign ‘My belly is

mine’ and various commissions and working groups of 15-M in London.

Rodrigo had been a researcher without a contract for many years in Portugal

before coming to the UK to start a PhD student at the University of London.

Back in Portugal, he was a member of the left coalition Bloco de Esquerda.

Pancho (32) came to the UK in 2012 when his partner moved here. He

remained unemployed for most of the time, working odd jobs in graphic

design and translation despite being a qualified environmental engineer. As

the prospects for employment remained bleak throughout, he decided to move

on to Germany where he has been working in a pizza shop and other odd jobs.

Back in Spain, he had been a labour organizer with the Sindicat Andalucia

Trabajadores (SAT). While he had a hard time taking up activist roles in

London, he started to the 15-M Worker Action Group in Berlin where he now

lives. He has been profiled in El Pais, and Der Spiegel as part of the new

generation of Spanish migrants in Europe.

Marco (56) is back in London for the third time in his life now. After being

unemployed for nearly a year in Portugal, Marco, an IT-worker, decided to

move to London. At first he moved to London without his family trying to

arrange meet-ups at least once a month. Back in Portugal, he had been active

in open-source and digital rights groups but would not have considered

himself a political activist.

Claudia (33) has been in London for nearly ten years. She has worked in

various jobs. Her last job was in a NGO for women’s rights. This autumn she

will be leaving though for Latin America. She was a prominent activist in the

15-London, Occupy London and now in the European Greens of London.