But the points here also relate to leadership. At one of our events in San Francisco, when we talked about generation, movement and organisation, how each can be understood as verb and as noun, David Solnit made an excellent point about leadership. We can think of leadership too as verb and as noun.

Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin both led, provided leadership, and so can be thought of as leaders. But neither was A LEADER, in the party-political sense.

I think the political lesson here is that we need both many leaders and many followers. Or rather that we need to be both leader and follower. We need to keep trying new things — leadership or potential leadership — and we also need to be attuned the new doing of others, and be ready to follow. Here, picking up on a new idea and following it is a particular form of leadership itself: to lead by following! And this is what we see in that analysis of the “unstoppable dance”: it’s why the third dancer is key in the creation of a movement.

A contemporary political example is UK Uncut. They had an idea, others recognised its novelty and its power and so they followed, repeating the action, but adapting it, i.e. repetition with difference.