this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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"Leader" is a word invented by the bourgeois class to replace "noble" as a justification for their position at the apex of a pyramidal society. It's such a universal concept that in Spanish, they only started using "líder" as a loanword in the past few decades.
I don't understand what concept you're trying to convey. Is a leader a person who exhibits a display of class? Is a leader someone who cares about someone else? Is a leader someone who helps other people? Or are you using the example to describe an opposite, that a leader is someone who enriches themself at the expense of others?
I have a good idea of what a spokesperson is. And what a parliamentarian is. And what a teacher is. And what a strategist is. I have no fucking clue what a "leader" is.
leader is just literally a person who leads, it could be dictatorial or democratically.
you are being very strange right now
It's a strange world.
Can you describe what skills the Youth Leadership Conference teaches?
The word has been deeply abused, please don't act like it hasn't.
Liberals co-opting the word leadership doesn't discredit the concept of leaders.
People like Mao, who led the outnumbered Chinese Red Army through the 9000km Long March to keep the revolution alive.
People like Che and Fidel, who arrived in Cuba with a starting force of merely 80 men and managed to liberate Cuba from the US backed Batista
People like John Brown who yearned for the freedom of all and was willing to die for it.
The concept of leaders may be tainted by liberals because they desire people who can maximise profit. But leaders who can channel and direct the latent grievances of the wretched of the earth into action against the forces of oppression are vital to the progress of humanity.
True leadership can be the difference between fascism and liberation.
John Brown and Mao and Fidel and Che were all commanders*. Perhaps also figureheads. Mao and Che were excellent theorists; John Brown and Fidel were particularly inspiring spokesmen. If you were to make radial graphs of each executive, they'd be drastically different.
Fidel and Che spoke a language that didn't have the word "leader" in it and certainly did not include the concept of "leadership". I don't know Chinese well enough to make any conclusions about it.
John Brown revised a lot of his ideas away from overall subordination of children in an era where patriarchy was particularly strong.
*Command in war is one place where there is a stratified authority across the board, rather than in just one domain. Perhaps that is why so many First Nations would separate the role of war chief from other forms of authority.
I guess my point here is that the component parts of "leadership" are a lot more useful than the blanket concept. Maybe in centuries past, education and development would have been so limited that one person could be the best at all these parts... maybe. But these days, examining the blind spots of our language and culture, and using anthropology and linguistics and biology and other sciences to inform our politics, could be the difference between a movement faltering and succeeding.
This is why the left has so few leaders… and the government assassination and incarceration
Having one "leader" that you roll all the executive functions or skills of power into, and who just does all those things while a bunch of "followers" do none of those things, is imbalanced and vulnerable.
If you have 1 leader, the government or counter-revolutionaries can easily assassinate, incapacitate, blackmail, bribe, or compromise that leader, and you can kiss your progress goodbye. If you have a council of the highest roles in different domains that are distributed amongst several people, it's much harder to compromise, the payoff is less, and a compromised figure is almost automatically replaced.
ideology, even in the most stratified socialist society the position of 'leader' is very democratic
I suppose I'm using "leader" as a rough synonym for organizer, in that they are able to motivate other people toward a goal and direct collective action
But is that really one unitary thing, or is it like the concept of intelligence, where there are a lot of different measurable capacities that all get rolled into one, and we think about it as one single concept because we are accustomed to using the word for that concept?
Isn't that just how words work? Most concepts can be broken down into component concepts
Some concepts, not all. I'd say not even most.
We start out in the dark and we make associations between things and this develops our understanding. Eventually we can put a picture together from all the linkages, or reach a true elementary foundation. But we don't start from knowledge.
Sometimes we have words for things, like ether and phlogiston, that are based on our assumptions and work for a little while as heuristics, but further and rigorous investigation reveals that they were inaccurate inventions of our own minds.
Anyone who's acquired a second language, or been immersed in a different nation's culture, or studied anthropology, learns that there are some things that don't carry over very well. It's the concepts that are neither universal nor quantifiable nor specific that I look into as candidates for dissolving.
In the associations I’ve worked with, all committees and boards have a designated ‘leader’. The role of a leader is to know how everyone is doing, to resolve internal conflicts, to organise and direct the meetings and to take over any task of a member who is not able to fulfil theirs. I would say that a good leader has a somewhat high emotional intelligence and has a broad skillset in order to be able to take over other peoples tasks. The leader is usually the one who puts in the most energy because ideally they are on top of everything that’s going on.
I’ve seen a lot of people doing a terrible job at it though because they think that their job is to just be assertive and motivate the other members to do their tasks, which is what the media often describes as ‘good leadership’.
I'd be willing to bet those boards also had a "secretary" and a "vp/co-chair" and a "treasurer" and possibly other positions, because "the one person who runs everything in the organization" is both too much for one person to handle, and doesn't allow people to specialize as well.
You have described a "leader" as a Social Connector, a Conflict Resolver, a Parliamentarian, and a Generalist. Why should these all be one person, instead of separate people, so they can all do a better job of their thing?
Sounds like there are many divergent and incompatible definitions of "leader" and "leadership".
Thinking about the Cabinet of the executive branch also informs my thinking. Joe Biden is a perfect example of how all the departments would run just fine without him. Yet he is the foremost leader in the land.
You make good points, I can see how an organisation can work with the tasks I described subdivided into equal roles. And it might be more democratic that way. To me it doesn’t discredit the meaning of the word leader though. Words often don’t have a single definition that works for everyone, and I agree that this word has lost its meaning in general. But in the associations I mentioned the word does have a clear meaning as I described. So in some contexts I do think it makes sense to use it.
I agree with this just because it makes people think more about stuff they take for granted