I read a great book recently called If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Great book. It mentions Occupy Wall Street in it. Basically talks about how leaderless movements like Occupy never really get anywhere. When anyone can talk for the movement it means that any person who happens to be kinda shitty about some things can represent the entire movement. This also extended to how some movements tried to have all the decisions they made be a unanimous vote by everyone who was actively at an encampment. This meant that one person who is a dick and disagrees about something minor could stop the entire movement in its tracks. It also means said movements can be co-opted by people who want the exact opposite.

For instance, it talked about a protest movement in Sao Paulo Brazil that was leaderless and actually managed to get what it wanted done. It was about stopping the raising of the bus fair in the city. Shut down the fucking city to make sure it didn’t happen. But once that was done, the same energy was then co-opted to help protest to get Bolsonaro into power. Something that the original organizers of the original movement didn’t want.

Essentially, you should read this book, it’s really helpful for understanding the flaws with a leaderless movement like Occupy and how maybe the best way for progress isn’t to be leaderless but to have a fucking leader.

Edit: the most successful movements in history have all had leaders. Every single one. Being leaderless isn’t actually very helpful.

Edit 2: changed flawless to flaws