Strategies for David
Since 2007, the USA has been experiencing an amazing series of social movements with tremendous impact on politics. An enthusiastic as much as disciplined grass root organization initially carried the charismatic outsider Barack Obama into the White House. However, only a few weeks after him taking office he saw the Tea Party springing up, a conservative counter movement largely blocking Obama’s agenda and, in November 2010, voting a majority of right-wing Republicans into the House of Representatives. However, while the Tea Party has become less important ever since, the Occupy movement formed in the centers of the American metropolises in the fall of 2011. How do you explain this rapid popular movement pendulum motion from the left to the right and now in the vaguely left direction?
The search for answers takes you to Harvard University in Boston, and further back into Germany’s American occupied zone after the Second World War. Marshall Ganz teaches at this elite university. As a veteran of the civil rights movement and the labor disputes of the Mexican-American farm workers in California, the 69-year-old is considered the guru of “Organizing”. In the USA, this term is used for setting up civic initiatives which exert direct pressure on politics. Ganz had trained Obama’s innovative grass root organization, an essential contribution to Obama’s electoral victory.
Childhood Memories
At the beginning of the discussion on Obama, the Tea Party and Occupy movements, however, Ganz reverts to his childhood and parents. His father, Irving Ganz, was a military rabbi who did more than mentor Jewish soldiers in Munich, Stuttgart, and Heidelberg from 1946-1949. According to Ganz, the rabbi also assisted Holocaust survivors who, at the time, were living in camps for homeless “displaced persons”. “I spent my fifth birthday with orphans from the DP Camps. It wasn’t until much later that I realized why these Jewish children did not have parents.” His mother, Sylvia, was a teacher. According to the man with the moustache who, despite sizeable corpulence, still emits youthful energy, his parents considered the Holocaust not merely a result of anti-Semitism: “For them the Nazis were racists, and racism could result in fatal consequences wherever you are.”
In his parents’ house in Pessach, Ganz also intensely experienced Passover Seders, and early on considered the meaning of the exodus from Egypt highly topical: “The path from enslavement to freedom – that was the goal of the American South’s civil movement.” Ganz arrived at Harvard in 1960 with a scholarship, and considered it a matter of course to join its students of the Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The organization dispatched volunteers to the southern states who, often risking their own lives, took part in demonstrations and supported blacks while being entered into the list of voters. In 1964, he gave up his studies and became instrumental to the “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi. The following two years, he stayed at Ku Klux Klan strongholds like McComb near the border of Louisiana. “That was my political education. I was shocked by the inequality over there. The blacks had been completely disenfranchised politically, economically, and culturally.”
Ganz and other SNCC activists had to find out that no books or medications could free the blacks from their misery. “Soon we realized that inequality is a question of power. However, the only way to resolve this matter is if the concerned parties take charge of their own fate.” This realization led Ganz and his allies to the search for resources the powerless could use to improve their situation: “One of the examples was the legendary bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in late 1955. Activists like Rosa Parks realized that they did not have power but feet, and that they could gain influence by waiving public transportation.” Mahatma Ghandi in India had demonstrated that before, according to Ganz: “The lessons were clear – change can be brought about by collective action. However, this requires an organization and competent leaders. Rosa Parks had been a member of the civil rights organization NAACP since 1943, and Martin Luther King also learned at the Baptist seminar how to motivate people and bring them together.”
Working at the Academy
Ever since then, Ganz devoted himself to these lessons: How can you make people overcome fear and lethargy, and realize that individual problems are common problems? And how can you resolve these problems using persistent and purposeful influence? After two years in Mississippi, he returned to Bakersfield, California, where he had spent his youth. Over there he took notice of the dispute of the underpaid farm workers of Mexican descent who, at the time, had set up the “United Farm Workers” union. Up until the 1980s, Ganz worked with labor leaders like César Chávez, and was later active for other unions and politicians like Nancy Pelosi and today’s Governor Jerry Brown.
Nevertheless, toward the end of the Reagan era the activist felt burned out. “Somehow I didn’t make any more progress. I wanted to broaden my horizon and further reflect upon my work.” A class reunion at Harvard showed him a way out. Following a long conversation with the dean, Ganz decided to resume his studies, he commented with a smile: “I graduated as a member of the classes of 1964 and 1992. My 81-year-old mother came from California to attend the ceremony.” Afterwards Ganz stayed for his dissertation in sociology concerning the United Farm Workers at the Charles River, and ultimately accepted a teaching position at Harvard’s “Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations”. The dissertation with the title “Why David Sometimes Wins” was published in 2009.
As an academic, Ganz corroborates his lessons about “Organizing” introducing bible texts, scripts of Jewish philosophers like Maimonides, and even Shakespeare dramas. A favorite passage is the third scene in the fourth act of “Henry V” when the young king uses the famous St. Crispins speech about “us happy few, we band of brothers” to motivate his exhausted troops for the encounter with a far larger French army of knights on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. This is where Ganz draws the connection to his central conclusion: strong organizations arise out of a common narrative, a story the future members can relate to. At the same time, feelings and the “moral outrage”, of such importance to Martin Luther King, form the starting point. Prior to the victory in Agincourt, Henry V “not only tells his own but his people’s story; the story doesn’t concern the past but the future, and it’s not a story of desperation but of hope”, says Ganz.
From Obama to Occupy
The “Camp Obama” was also based on this assumption. That’s where Ganz taught activists to relate their own story with the hopeful narrative of the candidate, thus creating a “commonality in diversity” within the heterogeneous Obama coalition (labor union members, blacks, young people, and many more). This is how 13 million activists and volunteers finally made the campaign for Obama their own. It held the in late 2008 much discussed potential of using the election organization to create a permanent and creative institution which could develop its own programs and promote Obama’s agenda say by putting pressure on the Democrats in Congress. Many of the supporters had actually backed Obama in the belief that he would keep his promise to “clean up the corrupt status quo in Washington”.
However, as we know, this did not happen. Ganz mentions soberly that, only shortly after the election, he heard that Obama and consultants like Rahm Emanuel wanted to assign their grass root organization to the Democratic Party headquarters thus exclude them from the political decision making process. According to Ganz, this created a vacuum in the public sphere, soon to be exploited by conservative lobbies and activists: the Tea Party began where the Obama campaign had to leave off, pushing elected officials and officials of the Republican Party toward the right. Ganz, on the other hand, centers his hopes on Occupy. A number of Obama activists have joined that movement, now working on a new beginning in May. Others committed themselves to environmentalism or immigration reform. In contrast, the guru of “Organizing” does not see much of a future for the Tea Party: “The members of the Tea Party are white, and most of them are approaching the evening of life. I consider this movement a last breath rather than a baby’s cry.”●
Marshall Ganz’ organizational model on the internet:http:isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k2139
Marshall Ganz: Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Andreas Mink is a US correspondent for the JM Jüdischen Medien AG and lives in Connecticut.
