A leaderless movement can run on traditions people already practice. Long-standing customs of reciprocal gift-giving and unpaid shared work for the community literally fed the protesters, and older forms of indigenous self-rule gave a model for organizing without a hierarchy.
A routine protest that onlookers find tiresome can become a mass movement the moment the government answers it with brutal force. People who were annoyed by a yearly strike join it once they see the strikers beaten, and the narrow demand for school funding grows into a demand for direct, participatory democracy.
Once people who were never heard learn to speak publicly, they don't want to go back to silence. Ordinary people who seize a broadcast station, or who start running their own community radio, come away changed, and that change outlasts the movement's defeats: 'We will never be the same again.'
When the official state withdraws, neighborhoods can run their own safety, food distribution and transport without central command, and crime can even fall. A movement shifts from following a union's calls to communities physically controlling their own streets through barricades, with each task handled by a small group rather than an individual leader.
A government facing self-organized communities may pull uniformed police off the streets and send plainclothes squads in unmarked cars instead. These forces shoot at people gathered at barricades and carry out arrests, frame-ups and beatings while keeping the state's hand hidden.