I.

Let’s begin again with a film—as we did in an earlier text in this series, “The Rooster of San Michele.” In 1967, a year before Parisian students took to the streets and May ’68 became the symbol of an entire era, Jean-Luc Godard made a film about five young people who decide to live together in an apartment and form a Maoist group. He called it La Chinoise—The Chinese Girl [1].

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The apartment belongs to Véronique’s bourgeois parents; she is a philosophy student at Nanterre, the university suburb where, a few months later, the fuse will be lit [2]. The five spend their summer reading Marxist texts, lecturing one another, discussing how they will apply revolution. In the mornings they do exercises, shouting Maoist slogans. At night they debate revolutionary culture, drinking tea from porcelain cups.

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Colin MacCabe—Godard’s biographer—has noted that the film operates as a loose conversation with Dostoevsky’s Demons: a group living inside ideas that begin to hunger for action. One of the characters, Kirilov, takes his name directly from the novel; and like his literary ancestor, he ends by killing himself [3].

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The film stages the gap between theory and practice—what happens when ideas begin to demand implementation, when reading is no longer enough and you have to choose exactly how you will pass into action.

But what concerns us here is something else: the way the film shows a group distributing roles. Godard’s characters are not people you are meant to love or hate—they are carriers of attitudes. Véronique is the pull of the “pure line”: the need to find the correct theory and apply it without compromise. Guillaume, an actor, is politics as performance—the vanity that tangles with faith. Henri is the “revisionist,” eventually expelled for deviating from the line. Kirilov is the artist who cannot find a place for art inside the revolution.

And Yvonne?

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Yvonne is the peasant girl, the only one of working-class origin. And while the others theorize, Yvonne brings tea, cleans the windows, polishes their shoes. During the lectures she sits at the back doing chores. She struggles to grasp the theory more than the others—but no one stops to explain it to her. For a group that proclaims the Maoist slogan “women hold up half the sky,” the irony is obvious: Yvonne functions as the revolution’s maid.

This text begins there: with Yvonne carrying the tea. And it asks: why do collectives produce roles that harden, as if they were natural characters? And how might they not?

II.

We won’t speak here about informal forms of “leadership”—the classic question of who decides (perhaps we’ll take that up in a later text). We’ll stay with something more diffuse: how, inside every collective, roles take shape and, over time, set.

The mediator. The one who “holds the vision.” The technician. The caretaker. The complainer. The believer. The skeptic. The person who always speaks first in the assembly, and the one who never speaks.

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Anyone who has spent time in horizontal collectives knows how these roles emerge almost automatically. No one assigns them officially. And yet, at some point, this person becomes “the one who knows,” that person becomes “the one who keeps the atmosphere,” another becomes “the one who remembers what we decided,” and so on. As if there were a choreography distributing positions—without anyone having designed it.

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“No one is irreplaceable” is a phrase that often surfaces in internal movement discussions, more as a desire or a principle. But in practice, collectives produce their own irreplaceables. And when these people leave—from exhaustion, from a life change, from conflict—the group suddenly discovers that something is missing: a piece of knowledge, a connection, a way of doing the “obvious.”

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Personally, I see “no one is irreplaceable” as a goal: to organize in such a way that roles circulate instead of sticking to individuals. Because when they stick, the group becomes fragile and unjust: some burn out, some get comfortable, some come to believe this is simply how things are done, and the “we” begins to resemble an informal division of labor—necessary for the struggle to continue, but without recognition, without protection, without rotation.

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III.

If “no one is irreplaceable” has practical content, it presupposes, first of all, a politics of circulation: creating conditions so that what usually remains “stuck” to persons can move—be shared, passed hand to hand.

And the raw material of that circulation is knowledge.

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I remember a comrade in a collective I was part of. He was the one who knew “everything,” mostly in the sense of information. He knew because he held it: the archive, phone numbers, contacts, the group’s history, what we had decided two years ago and why. When someone had a question, almost always it ended with him.

At some point he broke his leg. Nothing serious—but for two weeks he didn’t come to assemblies. And I will never forget the awkwardness of those first meetings: suddenly we were groping in the dark. Who remembered what we had said about this or that issue?

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But I remember something else too, tied to the role he had acquired: along with the awkwardness, I felt a small breath of air. His absence made space. You could propose something without unconsciously waiting for the confirmation—or correction—of the person who “knows.” There I felt something simple: knowledge, when it concentrates, doesn’t function only as a tool. It also becomes a center of gravity, even when no one intends it.

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Sarah J. Lockwood, a political scientist who studied mobilization dynamics in South Africa, uses the term “protest brokers” for the people who connect the pieces: they know which lawyer to call, which group has equipment, which journalist will understand what’s happening without distorting it. In other words: they keep channels open.[4] And that connective labor is not secondary; it is the condition for the collective’s existence as a collective. Without bridges, groups become islands.

From there emerges the ambiguity of the “irreplaceable.” It is not always the product of ambition—of people wanting to make themselves necessary (though vanity can certainly be part of it). Often it is the product of function. When knowledge, contacts, and memory do not exist as shared infrastructure, they live inside people. And function, inevitably, produces necessities.

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IV.

The second dimension is status—and the “voice” that comes with it.

A friend recently told me about the infamous assemblies at Gkini, a space that for years served as a meeting point for a large part of the movement. “A lot of people spoke,” she said. “But the issue was who spoke. It took so much courage to speak. You didn’t just have to overcome yourself—you had to overcome those who had become the measure of what it means to speak.”

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That “to overcome someone” describes an atmosphere: the weight that certain persons acquire within horizontal processes because, over time, they became carriers of the correct tone. In other words: they became a role. And like every unnamed role, it stuck to them. And the more it stuck, the harder it became for someone else to speak.

In many assemblies you can predict, with an almost uncomfortable precision, who will speak first, who will speak last, who will remain silent. And it isn’t simply a matter of temperament or personality. It has to do with how the space works: who has time to be there every time, who has learned to speak “authoritatively,” who knows the history, who has allies in the room. It has to do with gender and age, with class and language, with who can endure the steady weight of everyone’s gaze. Status is the way all these conditions translate into something very (very) simple: a voice.

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In contemporary movement studies, this is being said more plainly. Silke Roth, a German sociologist, has shown across multiple studies that every movement is shaped by multiple axes of privilege and disadvantage [5]. These axes determine who participates and how, which demands get advanced and which are sidelined, who is heard and who remains at the margins. A horizontal structure, by itself, does not cancel these inequalities—it relocates them into everyday politics: who takes the floor, who facilitates, who “closes” the discussion.

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Here the question of status meets the problem of the irreplaceable. The longer a group lasts, the more certain individuals accumulate informal influence—knowledge of history, networks, the ability to “summarize” what was decided, and more. This accumulation happens because some people are there more, have “put in” more time, speak more “correctly.” And so, without anyone planning it, they become the only ones who “know how things are done (((properly))).” They become irreplaceable as carriers of status.

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V.

The third dimension is responsibility.

“If I don’t do it, it won’t happen.” How many times have you thought it? How many times was it true—and how many times was it true because no one else had learned how to do it?

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Responsibility sticks to people in an almost invisible way. Someone takes something on—“temporarily,” they say. They do it well. Others withdraw. Then they need that person. And the circle closes: the person who took it on “temporarily” becomes the person who does it almost always. The role has stuck. And now they are irreplaceable—because responsibility never circulated, because no one else “learned” at the same level.

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I won’t forget a farewell text I once read—someone leaving a collective. On the surface it was political disagreement: “I don’t agree with the direction.” But if you read more carefully, something else lived beneath the words: fatigue, resentment, the sense that you are carrying things alone and no one sees it. That is the problem with the stuck role: the more it sticks, the more invisible it becomes. The role turns into your “character”—you take on the features of responsibility as if they were personal traits. And when that happens, responsibility stops being recognized as responsibility: “that’s just how so-and-so is,” we say. When recognition disappears, fatigue becomes bitterness. And bitterness, eventually, becomes departure.

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Walter Benjamin—in the essay “The Author as Producer,” written in 1934 as a lecture at an Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris—formulated something that touches this issue directly. Speaking about the role of the intellectual in class struggle, he wrote: the more precisely someone knows their position in the process of production, the less they will be tempted to regard themselves as an “intellectual” [6].

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The line contains a radical idea: the “intellectual”—in quotation marks—is the one who imagines that their value lies in their person, in their uniqueness, in something only they possess. The producer, by contrast, knows their value lies in the function they perform—and that this function can be transmitted, taught, shared.

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Benjamin criticizes the left intellectual who experiences solidarity with the proletariat “ideologically” rather than “as a producer”: the one who identifies with the struggle at the level of ideas without examining their own position within the material process. That is: without asking what exactly they produce, by what means, for whom, under what terms—and, crucially, whether what they do can become a collective capacity: whether others can learn it, continue it, so that the same person is not always required.

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That is precisely what happens with responsibility in collectives: when responsibility sticks to the person instead of the function, the person who carries it becomes Benjamin’s “intellectual”—irreplaceable, singular, necessary. Instead of rotating as a function, responsibility becomes an attribute someone “has.”

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VI.

The fourth dimension is perhaps the most invisible: care.

Let’s return to Yvonne in La Chinoise. While the others discuss revolution, she brings tea. While the others lecture, she cleans. The irony is obvious: a group that speaks about solidarity with the working class cannot connect with its own working-class housemate.

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Yvonne is a figure we have all met. In every collective there is someone who “holds the atmosphere”: who senses when tension is about to explode and says something to break it; who remembers to ask “are you okay?”; who, after a difficult action or a harsh discussion, sits down and listens to those who need to talk. And there is someone—usually a woman—who brings cookies or crackers to the big assembly. Small thing, you might say. But try holding a five-hour meeting when no one has thought that people will get hungry.

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Arlie Russell Hochschild gave a name to this kind of work: emotional labor. In The Managed Heart (1983), she describes how certain jobs require not only physical or mental effort but also the management of feeling: smiling when you are tired, appearing calm when you are angry, tending to other people’s emotional states.[7] Hochschild studied flight attendants and bill collectors—but the concept travels far beyond wage labor. And it highlighted something basic: this labor is unevenly distributed.

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“Emotional labor” can feel overextended—as we apply it to more things, it loses some precision. But that also shows its power: we recognize it because we have lived it or watched it happen. In collectives, this emotional labor often appears as care. And to understand when care circulates and when it sticks, we need a distinction that is often overlooked.

There is care as an act: something you do for someone, once or many times. And there is care as a position: something you are inside the group—a role assigned to you or silently assumed. The difference is crucial. When care is an act, it can be mutual, gift-like: today I care for you; tomorrow you may care for me. When it becomes a position, it hardens: you are the one who cares; others are the ones who are cared for. And then care stops being a relationship—it becomes a role. A role that, as we’ve seen, sticks.

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Silvia Federici—a feminist theorist who worked for decades on women’s invisible labor in the home—has a line that captures this shift: “what they call love, we call unpaid work.” The line is associated with the slogan and spirit of the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign: an effort to recognize that domestic labor and the reproduction of everyday life (care, cleaning, cooking, emotional support) are not “natural” feminine inclinations but labor that sustains “proper” labor.[8]

Here lies the first complexity: care is not only invisible—it is systematically excluded from the definition of “real work.” In a collective, “real work” means organizing an action, drafting a text, managing contacts. These tasks are discussed, assigned, recognized. Care—listening to someone who had a hard time, softening a conflict, breaking the ice—gets recorded nowhere. It is the invisible infrastructure that keeps the movement standing—just as necessary as a street marshaling line.

The second complexity involves gender. Emotional labor is not “naturally” female, but it is socially distributed unevenly. Hochschild showed this in wage labor; Federici highlighted it in the home; and in movement spaces we see analogous mechanisms.

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Leslie Carmel Gauditz, studying the No Borders movement, notes that many “feeling rules” in movements—the informal expectations about how you should feel and behave—are gendered.[9] The same behavior is not evaluated the same way for everyone. Some are expected to be “cool,” “resilient,” not to show need; others are expected to be “available,” to listen, to soften conflict, to “hold” the atmosphere.

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The third complexity is darker. When care hardens into a role, it is not only invisible and gendered—it becomes a form of power. That may sound contradictory: how can the position of the “sensitive and good,” the one who cares for others, also be a position of strength? But think about it: the caregiver knows. They know who is struggling, who fought with whom, what people need. Care creates relations of trust—and trust is capital. The caregiver becomes irreplaceable, not because no one else can bring tea, but because no one else has the relationships built through care.

Care is thus trapped in a double condition: weak (unrecognized, unrewarded, non-rotating) and powerful (accumulating knowledge, building ties, creating dependencies). And through those ties it produces informal balances inside the collective: who we listen to, who we trust, whose version “counts” more in a conflict, who can soften a decision or protect someone from consequences.

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There is real substance here. When care becomes a role, it can also function like a shield—covering behaviors that would otherwise be criticized, with arguments like “they’re a good person,” “they’ve offered so much,” “they hold the group together,” or “they haven’t been well lately.” It can even produce an informal hierarchy in which the caregiver becomes the “mediator” everyone needs—so that whatever passes through them gains weight. And in cases of harmful behavior, including gendered harm, that trust-capital can delay recognition, blunt accountability, or shift the conversation from responsibility to sympathy.

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VII.

The fifth dimension doesn’t concern your role in the group so much as whether that role locks you inside the collective “we.” In other words: how someone is “counted.” Who counts as a member? Who fits in the story the group tells about itself? Who is “in”—and on what terms?

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The previous dimensions (knowledge, status, responsibility, care) describe functions: what someone contributes, takes on, gets recognized for. But there is another, more foundational dimension: one’s place in the collective “we.” It concerns identity positions.

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Scholars of collective identity—from Alberto Melucci to Polletta and Jasper—describe movements as spaces where a “we” is constructed: a shared sense that we belong to something, share something, struggle for something together.[10] This “we” is not given—it is built through interactions, narratives, shared experience. And like every construction, it has boundaries: it defines who comes in and who remains out, who is recognized as “one of us” and who is not.

The problem is not belonging as such. The problem is when belonging hardens: when the “we” stops being an open mode of relationship and becomes a fixed regime of recognition. And when belonging hardens, it often takes two opposite, equally binding forms: the one who over-belongs, and the one who under-belongs. The first belongs under the sign of correctness; the second belongs as the “black sheep.”

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The believer is the one who over-belongs.

Albert Hirschman—in his classic book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970)—described loyalty as what delays exit: the loyal member does not leave the moment things become difficult; they wait, hope, try to change things from within. In Hirschman’s model, loyalty is what allows voice to play its role before someone abandons.[11]

But loyalty is not only staying over time—it is service to the vision. The believer carries the group’s continuity: its memory, the body that was there “from the beginning,” the proof that “we still exist.” In collectives, devotion often functions as an informal mechanism of cohesion. When there are no shared rules and procedures, what regulates behavior are informal norms. And often the strongest norm is how devoted you are.

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Here lies the trap. Loyalty can become a measure. A measure for the believer (who cannot leave without “betraying”) and a measure for everyone else (who are compared to the believer’s devotion). The believer’s presence acquires symbolic function—it becomes the embodiment of the “we.” And that symbolic function makes the believer irreplaceable.

In other words: the believer becomes irreplaceable in the dimension of belonging, just as the keeper of knowledge becomes irreplaceable in the dimension of knowledge. And the weight of that singularity lands on their shoulders.

The helper of defeat is the opposite: the one who belongs “deficit-ly.”

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In an earlier text I wrote about those who half-belong in collectives, starting from Giorgio Agamben’s short piece “Helpers,” which refers to the strange creatures in Kafka’s novels: the Gehilfen—those who don’t help, don’t understand, have no gift, cause trouble, and yet remain there, stuck to our lives like a shadow [12].

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The helper of defeat is the one the movement doesn’t know what to do with. They don’t “pull,” don’t follow the “line.” It isn’t that you don’t want them—it’s that you don’t know where to place them. They have no place in the “we.” They are there, but they don’t belong—or, more precisely, their belonging is not recognized.

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The difference from the believer is not merely moral—it is structural. The believer fits in the story the group tells about itself: the “hero” of continuity, proof of endurance. The helper doesn’t fit: they are the remainder, what the group would rather forget. The believer carries the memory of the vision; the helper carries the memory of those discarded.

Both roles—the believer and the helper—show something about belonging when it hardens. Both function as measures: the believer as a positive measure (what you “should” be to belong), the helper as a negative measure (what you “shouldn’t” be). Both become irreplaceable because they serve that measuring function inside the collective. The group needs both to define the “we”: the “model” and the “anti-model,” the inside and the outside.

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As long as these roles remain stuck to particular people, belonging stops being a relationship and becomes a regime. It turns into a system of recognition that distributes value and voice, rewards over-conformity, and maintains permanent exceptions for those who don’t fit. And then the “we” is not what we are—it is what we are permitted to be.

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VIII.

Let’s gather what we’ve seen. Five dimensions, five ways a role can stick: knowledge that isn’t transmitted, status that accumulates, responsibility that doesn’t rotate, care that isn’t recognized, belonging that hardens—either in the one who is “always there” or in the one who is “always at the margins.” In every case the pattern is the same: something that could be a function—something you do, take on, offer, even something that happens to you—turns into an attribute, something you are. And when that happens, the role sticks.

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Three clarifications before we move on.

First: the five dimensions are not exhaustive—there are many other roles, and no one “wears” only one. In contemporary life, the roles we take on are multiple and overlapping.

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Second: the problem is not that roles exist—roles are inevitable. And behind the “front” of the role there are conditions that produce them: available time, access to knowledge, class and gender inequalities. But there is another dimension we must also recognize: people often choose these roles and find meaning in them. The “caretaker” may feel they are doing something valuable—that care is their way of contributing. Someone may find security and pride in their specialization: “I do this well; this is me.” The believer may draw identity from having been there “from the beginning,” from holding memory, from not leaving. The question, however, is why the role stuck, at what cost, and what happens when what may have begun as a choice becomes a position.

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Third: behind the hardening of roles we cannot ignore a powerful argument—efficiency. “Let X do it, because they know, so we don’t waste time and repeat ourselves.” And indeed: constant rotation has costs—training time, coordination energy, the inevitable slowness of learning. Under pressure—a looming action, an unfolding crisis—hardening can seem not merely logical but necessary. Where you must move fast, circulating roles looks like a luxury. But the problem is not what happens in the moment of pressure. The problem is when the moment becomes structure—when “temporary” turns into “always.” When today’s efficiency produces tomorrow’s fragility. A collective built on momentary efficiency sacrifices its ability to endure over time.

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And this is a good moment to touch something else. When someone leaves a collective—from burnout, disappointment, life changing—what happens? They leave. But the role remains. The slot waits for the next person. The group, without planning it, reproduces the same role again—because it needs it, because its structure demands it, because someone has to do what the person who left used to do. The circle closes: new person, same position, same dynamic.

This reveals something about “no one is irreplaceable” that we often miss. The phrase basically says: no one should be so central to something (as a carrier) that no one else can do it. But that applies to people. For roles, something else applies. Roles persist, reproduce themselves, find new carriers. Someone has to keep minutes, bring materials, remember what was decided, ask “are you okay?” These needs are real—the group doesn’t function without them. The question is whether these needs must always be covered by worn roles. The core problem is that the collective produces positions that require irreplaceables. People change. The choreography stays the same.

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IX.

What would a politics of “no one is irreplaceable” mean, then? The cynical version says: “we can replace anyone”—that’s market logic. Here we mean something different: structures built from the start so that knowledge is shared, responsibility rotates, status is broken up, care becomes a common matter, and belonging is a relationship.

The thoughts that follow are lessons from movements that tried, failed, tried again. They are noted here because some people live them, or lived them.

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On responsibility. August 2003, Oventik, Chiapas. Rain falls on thousands of people. The anthropologist Shannon Speed stands under a tarp and listens as a comandanta named Rosalinda takes the floor: “The government didn’t pay attention to us. Que se queden con sus pendejadas. We know how to make our municipalities work.” That day, the Good Government Councils are “born ”[13].

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The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, have practiced something that sounds simple for three decades: terms with an expiration date. Members of the Good Government Councils (Juntas de Buen Gobierno) rotate every one to eight weeks, depending on the region. Rotation is the structure itself. The goal, as they explain it: “for as many people as possible to pass through positions of responsibility over the years.” To democratize information. To build everyone’s capacity. Alongside this there are oversight committees to ensure power does not accumulate. Their principle: “to lead by obeying” (mandar obedeciendo).[14] This is not only a slogan; it is the result of five hundred years of resistance to centralized authority—and thirty years of everyday self-management.

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On status. September 2011, Zuccotti Park, New York. The historian Jeremy Brecher spends a night in the park. He watches someone holding the speakers’ list. He hears others say “step up, step back”—step forward if you usually stay silent, step back if you usually speak. He later writes: by the end of the process, almost everyone felt their personality and humanity had been recognized; there was no angry minority ready to leave.[15]

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In 2011, the Occupy movement experimented with a method called “progressive stack”—a technique for prioritizing the voices of those usually not heard: women, non-white speakers, disabled people, first-time speakers.[16] The logic: status, if you don’t interrupt it actively, accumulates by itself. It didn’t always work. Sometimes it became a formal procedure; sometimes it provoked backlash. But the question it raised remains the right one: how do you break the dynamic where two or three speak and everyone else stays silent? How do you avoid what Jo Freeman described in 1972 as the “tyranny of structurelessness,” where the absence of explicit rules simply leaves informal hierarchies free to dominate?[17].

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On knowledge. In many horizontal collectives there is a practice sometimes called “double bottomlining”: every knowledge-holding role has two people—one who knows and one who learns alongside them. The group’s memory becomes a shared good. Alongside this, documentation as political practice: archives kept, guides written, procedures recorded. The idea is that any knowledge left only in someone’s head has already begun to disappear—and its loss will be felt only when that person leaves.

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On assembly dynamics. Some collectives use a “vibes watcher”—yes, it can sound excessive, but the closest analogue in many traditions is simply good facilitation. Someone tracks what is happening beyond the words: who hasn’t spoken, who seems to have something but can’t get in, when tension rises, when a break is needed. They can interrupt: “We have four people who haven’t spoken at all—do you want to add something?” Or: “This has gotten very tense; I propose a five-minute break.” The role rotates—otherwise it would become another stuck position. Another practice is “going in rounds”: in a discussion, everyone speaks once in turn before anyone speaks a second time. It seems simple, but it disrupts the dynamic where the most comfortable people take over time.

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On care. The challenge is bigger here, because care tends to become invisible. A first move is to make it visible: mapping contribution/care (even just in discussion), or “care circles” that show what each member did—who brought food, who cleaned, who checked in on someone’s situation at home or at work. This helps patterns emerge. A second move, once it is recognized, is to share it. Caring is something anyone can learn—it isn’t a gift or a “talent,” it’s a practice you develop. And one crucial question must be asked explicitly, regularly, structurally: who cares for the caregivers?

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On belonging. The Zapatistas speak of “walking while asking” (caminar preguntando): the idea that no one knows the correct answer in advance, that the path is made as we walk, together, through disagreement and dialogue.[18] In practice this means room for those who don’t “fit” yet, who don’t speak the group’s language, who bring questions rather than answers. Welcome meetings for new members—repeatable practices of hospitality. Recognition that diversity is a resource, and that homogeneity, even when it feels comfortable, is often the sign of an exclusion we can’t see.

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One important thing, though: none of the above is a technical, managerial checklist inside a movement. Art, yes; technical, no. There is no list you follow and the problem is solved. The practices sketched here presuppose something that cannot be organized from above: a collective subject that wants to change how it functions. Without that, every tool becomes bureaucracy—another form to fill, another procedure to observe formally.

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You’ll also notice that I didn’t use the words “inclusion” or “empathy.” That’s not accidental. I suspect—perhaps a prejudice—that the more often these terms appear in a text or an organization, the more likely they are to be absent in practice. They become lightning rods: words that protect you from criticism without changing anything. What is described here is structure—how you organize so knowledge doesn’t lock, responsibility doesn’t accumulate, care doesn’t get left to the “good will” of a few. You don’t need to feel inclusion. You need to build structures that allow it.

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X.

At the end of La Chinoise, the group dissolves. Henri has been expelled. Kirilov has killed himself. Véronique has executed the Soviet minister—after first killing the wrong person. Guillaume decides to do “door-to-door” theater.

 

And Yvonne?

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Yvonne stays. Alone, in the empty apartment, with the porcelain cups and the Little Red Books on the shelves. The one who carried tea while the others spoke about revolution.

Look at the exits. The dissenter is expelled—the group pushed him out because his role was to ask, and questions became an obstacle. The artist collapses—his role was to give form, and when form proved inadequate he had nowhere to go. The theorist passes into practice and returns to theory—her role was always to have a next step, and so she does. The actor changes stage—his role was representation, and he finds a new audience. The caretaker remains. Her role was to keep things functioning—and when the things stopped existing, she remained there with the cups.

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What matters here, and what connects to everything above, is that roles determine not only how you stay in a group, but also how you leave it. Exit is already written into the position you held. The choreography remains valid even at the end. The film’s group dissolves because roles were stuck from the beginning—no one could become anything other than what they already were.

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So let’s read “no one is irreplaceable” as a process: a politics of circulation—spaces where no one needs to become necessary in order to belong. Where a role does not prewrite an exit. Where Yvonne could speak about revolution and Véronique could bring the tea.

Text: Aktaioros Samano_

Footnotes

[1] La Chinoise (France, 1967), directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
[2] Nanterre is a western suburb of Paris; the University of Nanterre was one of the key sites of student unrest that preceded May 1968.
[3] Colin MacCabe reads the film in dialogue with Dostoevsky’s Demons; “Kirilov” is a direct borrowing from the novel’s character.
[4] “Protest brokers” are actors who connect people, resources, and channels of communication, enabling coordination across groups.
[5] Roth’s work is part of a broader movement-studies turn toward intersectionality: how multiple forms of inequality shape internal movement life.
[6] Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” (1934). (In the text I paraphrase the point while keeping the thrust of his formulation.)
[7] Hochschild coined “emotional labor” to describe paid work that requires the active management and display of feeling; the concept is often extended to unpaid settings, including organizing.
[8] Federici’s phrase is associated with the Wages for Housework campaign, which reframed domestic labor and care as work sustaining capitalist production.
[9] “Feeling rules” = informal norms about what emotions are appropriate and how they should be displayed; Gauditz discusses how such norms can be gendered in activist spaces.
[10] “Collective identity” refers to the ongoing process through which a movement constructs a shared “we” (boundaries, meaning, recognition).
[11] Hirschman’s triad—exit, voice, loyalty—was developed for firms and organizations; movement theorists often adapt it as an analytic lens.
[12] Agamben’s “helpers” (Gehilfen) draws on Kafka: figures that cling to life as unresolved remainders rather than functional supporters.
[13] Oventik is a Zapatista community center in Chiapas; the “Good Government Councils” are rotating bodies created to administer autonomous municipalities.
[14] Mandar obedeciendo (“to lead by obeying”) is a Zapatista political principle: authority is accountable, reversible, and grounded in community mandate.
[15] “Step up, step back” is a facilitation norm meant to counteract status-driven domination of speaking time.
[16] “Progressive stack” is a facilitation technique that prioritizes speakers from groups that are typically marginalized in discussion.
[17] Jo Freeman’s “tyranny of structurelessness” argues that the absence of explicit structure does not eliminate hierarchy; it often strengthens informal hierarchies.
[18] Caminar preguntando (“walking while asking”) names a Zapatista ethos: knowledge emerges through collective practice and questioning, not prior certainty.

 

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