Power as domination is not only harmful - it violates the core of our being - but also unnecessary.
I was chatting with journalist and writer Chris Hedges recently. He kindly visited me in prison, sharing a story from the Occupy movement in New York, just before their eviction.
A group of activists had gathered at his house to decide their next steps. A decision had to be made quickly, so a few people took on leadership roles, made the call, and went back with a plan.
The notion of "horizontalism"—that there can be no leaders—is based on a fallacy. Leadership is inevitable because there are too many decisions for everyone to weigh in on, especially when time is critical.
Machine
The attempt at leaderlessness in fact creates a "tyranny of structurelessness," where unaccountable leaders emerge without clear designation.
For instance, who decided certain people would gather at Chris’s house? No one. Horizontalism imposes yet another mechanical grid on the complex ecology of social spaces, mirroring the rigid hierarchical structures it seeks to replace.
While good relationships can arise under both systems, they often do so in spite of these structures, not because of them.
Modern ideologies rooted in Enlightenment thinking often reduce everything to a single concept: power—as domination. We’ve lost the language to describe what truly happens when we work together and the imagination to envision new possibilities.
Thinkers like Edmund Burke and Pierre Proudhon wrestled with how a social ecology could thrive outside the mechanical language of Left and Right, moving beyond a view of society as a machine.
Kindness
This is no longer an abstract problem. If we fail to create humane and effective large-scale organisations capable of mass civil resistance, fascism—with its command-and-control structures and vast funding—will overpower us.
The unimaginable could happen again, on a global scale. The Left’s failure to establish a movement that can compete with the Labour Party demonstrates how we’re still struggling to let go of the old and create something new.
We need to begin with a foundational truth: power as domination is not only harmful but also unnecessary. It violates the core of our being—our need for mutual recognition, to give and receive love.
Power as domination corrupts both the wielder and the oppressed. Instead, we should focus on the quality of relationships, centred on love as action to enhance the well-being of others.
Respect, service, and trust are values that enrich these connections, yet today’s culture of suspicion corrodes these values, even within radical organisations. Challenges are inevitable, but they should come from a place of kindness and humility. After all, we are all human.
Power as domination is not only harmful - it violates the core of our being - but also unnecessary.
Rotation
These values need to be embedded in our organisations. They should be emphasised in new-member inductions, prioritised in ongoing projects, and modelled by ethical leadership.
This culture of respect and trust creates a social space where working together is joyful. In this environment, formal structures can be gently established, not rigidly imposed.
We need a diverse ecology of functions, with semi-autonomous working groups to get things done, and a small executive core group trusted with strategy and rapid decisions. This core receives continuous feedback from the working groups.
Young and new members are identified, trained, mentored, and eventually brought into the core group, while experienced members step back to advise. This rotation and training elevate collective intelligence.
System
Beyond individual organisations, we must abandon the neoliberal wasteland of isolated activism and also resist forming a monolithic movement.
Instead, we need a close-knit ecology of organisations that coordinate a shared national strategy, set dates for mass civil resistance, and organise local assemblies to select electoral candidates.
In moments of rupture, leaders will need the community’s trust to navigate the chaos and lay the groundwork for a new society to replace the collapsing structures around us.
This journey—from Extinction Rebellion to Just Stop Oil, and now the broader goals of Umbrella and a new national movement—aims to achieve what we all want: to change the entire system.
This Author
Roger Hallam is a founding member of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil and an activist with Umbrella. He is currently serving a five year prison sentence for participating in a online call discussing a climate action on the M25.
