In his new book, People, Power, Change — Organizing for Democratic Renewal, Marshall Ganz draws from personal experience as a labor and political organizer to lay out a vision for returning power to the people. If power is what regular people need more of, Ganz outlines the ways that you get it through knowing who you are, what your strategy is and what the actions are that will lead to success.
Ganz joined the United Farm Workers (UFW) as an organizer in the mid-1960s. It was there that he discovered that organizing was not just a function of “earnest, patient and persistent work,” but was a craft that he had to learn. Before the UFW, Ganz helped the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register voters in Mississippi, where he witnessed the tremendous courage and resiliency of local organizers who worked in the face of deadly violence.
People, Power, Change is not a self-help book or a guide to personal growth, but embedded in the story Ganz tells are insights into the importance of commitment, accountability and building healthy institutions. Organizers “gamble on the future,” Ganz says, by attempting to redistribute economic and political power in a society dominated by oligarchs. If you are going to make that kind of gamble, Ganz asserts, you had better be smart about it.
Ganz spoke with Capital & Main from Los Angeles, where he was meeting with community and labor organizations and promoting his book.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: The subtitle of your book is Organizing for Democratic Renewal. What’s the connection between the organizing tradition you have helped to build and the renewal of our democracy?
Marshall Ganz: The tricky thing about the word “renewal” is that it suggests we’ve had a functional democracy. The reality is it remains a promise much more than a reality. When you look at institutions like the Senate, the Electoral College, it’s very problematic. Democracy is not something you have, it’s something you do. It’s a practice.
Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, in a recent book, points out that most people these days own nothing, have to follow orders at work and constantly have their private life interfered with by corporate America. So, what does it mean to practice democracy when there’s no democracy to practice? There has been such an atrophy of organizations where people learn to associate, learn to govern themselves, develop affective bonds of solidarity. We’re operating where authority based in wealth is far more dominant than authority based in citizenship or in people. For me, organizing is about enabling people to work together to achieve their purposes. That’s why I linked the two.
Organizing, you write, is a craft. What is an organizer as distinct from an agitator or a mobilizer? Many people think these terms are indistinguishable.
I think of organizing as a form of leadership and the relationship of self to others and to action in the context of uncertainty. If you think about when leadership matters, it’s not when everything’s working. And I don’t confuse leadership and authority. If we think of leadership as about creativity and taking initiative, it is most needed where there are challenges, contradictions and dilemmas. Leadership is enabling others to achieve a shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty.
Organizing is a particular form of leadership. It starts not by asking “what’s my issue,” but “who are my people?” With whom am I entering into this relationship? Secondly, what is the change they need? Finally, how do I work with them to enable them to turn their resources into the power they need to achieve that change? Organizing is linking people, power and change. We look for three outcomes. Did we win whatever the campaign was? Did we come out of the project or campaign stronger, with greater capacity and power? Did we develop leadership to grow for the future?
You point out that leaders are not always the people that talk the loudest or have the bullhorn. How do you go about finding and developing leaders?
The first thing you do is pay attention. In the United Farm Workers, we would show up at a ranch and say, “We’re here to organize, and we want to know who the leaders are.” Three people would come forward and say, “We’re the leaders.” We would ask them to get all the people they were leading to a meeting that night and nobody would show up. They were leaders, as they say in Spanish, “de los dientes para afuera,” from the teeth outward. Leading with words only. You have to discern people’s relationships with other people and the extent to which they are enabling others to work together to achieve a shared purpose. It’s not leadership as a position. It’s a practice; a way of doing things and accepting responsibility. Organizers create opportunities for people to earn that responsibility.
The psychologist Robert Coles wrote a book called The Call of Stories. He wrote that people hope to tell their stories well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives. What is the role of storytelling in organizing?
Our natural response to that for which we’re not prepared is fear. Fear is one of the most fundamental emotions that we experience. Fear makes us run the other way, or strike out — which is not a very creative reaction to the unexpected.
In communities, how do we manage our fear? How do we manage our hearts? Stories are about that.
Stories are not interesting until there is a disruption; then we become interested because we can identify with the protagonist emotionally, not just conceptually. Stories provide emotional resources. This involves letting go of biases against speaking the language of emotion. Human beings are emotional, physical and conceptual creatures, and it turns out that emotion is a fundamental way of understanding others, understanding the world and understanding ourselves.
Stories are also a source of moral understanding, which is why faith traditions all teach in stories. So we pose this as this tension between hope and fear, solidarity and isolation, sense of self-worth as opposed to self-doubt. This is the moral or emotional content of public leadership in organizing.
Unless you are able to articulate to others why you’ve been called to what you’ve been called to, somebody else will tell your story for you. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable and to be seen is an invitation to others to allow themselves to be seen as well. You can then move to an “us,” the experience of solidarity and connectedness.
Donald Trump tells a dark story of decline, of threat, of invasion, of being poisoned. Why is that dark story so appealing to millions of people?
Some folks choose to mobilize out of fear. When you mobilize around fear, you do identify an “us,” but it’s identified only in relationship to an “other,” which is the source of all evil. The “us” is then robbed of any agency, because the solution is to turn yourself over to the great leader, who is the one who is taking up arms against that evil. If you mobilize around hope, you’re engaging people in discovering their own resources to achieve the change they want.
You write about the decline of common purpose in society. Are you pessimistic about our future?
Pessimism and optimism are both arrogance because they presume to predict the future and the future is unpredictable. I distinguish hope from optimism. Hope is realistic. The best definition that I found was [from 12th century philosopher] Maimonides, who had this idea that “hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable.”
In other words, it is always probable that Goliath will win. But sometimes David wins. It is improbable to elect a black man president of the country but it happened. There is this place between fantasy and certainty which is the domain of “could be.” For me, that’s where hope resides. I think we have to respect contingency and possibility. Organizers need imagination and courage in engaging with that uncertainty and turning it into opportunity. Hope is much more realistic than optimism.
One of the themes of your book is how organizations can be structured to prevent dysfunction. What makes for a healthy organization?
Corporate authority comes from the top down. In democratic organizations, authority flows from the bottom up. But there can be dysfunction in either kind.
I think accountability is a fundamental need of human beings. Because if we find ourselves in a place where we have no limits, humans are not very good at handling that without turning it into excess. Whether it’s a nation or an individual, the lack of accountability becomes a trap.
So how do you build into organizations meaningful forms of accountability and responsiveness? Who’s going to call you on your stuff, who’s not going to just tell you what they think you want to hear because you’ve got more power?
Or who’s not going to place expectations on you that no human can meet because you’re a charismatic God. I think one reason the things happened the way they did with the farmworkers was that the accountability mechanism was very weak.
When people with enormous power are unaccountable, they’re not so good at becoming modest, humble stoics. You can’t rely only on virtuous people. You have to rely on virtuous institutions. That means you’re constantly learning. Change is the one constant so we can panic about it or we can learn from it.
You describe becoming an organizer as a “learning journey.” You write about how to listen, accountability and discipline. Can organizing also be a life philosophy?
I hope so. Understanding the richness there can be within the person is a moral question. It’s also a political question. It’s an economic question. In a world where we are being dehumanized, organizing is a way to reassert the value of human beings and of a human life and of collective life.
I’ve been teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School, where power is never spoken about. What’s spoken of is market efficiency, which ignores the fact that we all live within power frameworks. So, understanding interdependence is to understand power. That leads to understanding about living life. Organizers see people not as deficits but as holding resources that have the potential for development. That’s important for democracy.
