BOOK REVIEW: Your Roadmap of How Collective Action Successfully Works

Written by Mike Miller

People…Power…Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal

by Marshall Ganz. Oxford University Press. 2024

This important book should be read by anyone who is or hopes to be a community, labor, issue or political campaign organizer for justice and people power. It should be required reading in any course that teaches organizing.

The Man

Ganz began his organizing work during the 1964 “Mississippi Summer Project,” an effort largely led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (“Snick”) to break the back of Mississippi’s caste rule that placed African-Americans in brutal conditions of poverty, discrimination and fear.

From Mississippi, he went to work as a farm workers’ union organizer in California’s San Joaquin Valley. There he came under the tutelage of Fred Ross, Sr. who trained Cesar Chavez and was called by him “my secret weapon.”

Where what was often helter-skelter in SNCC, Ross left no detail unattended. He demonstrated that discipline and creativity were supplements, not antagonists, for creative organizing.

Saul Alinsky hired Ross shortly after World War II to be Industrial Areas Foundation’s (IAF) organizer for Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles and later statewide. Alinsky heard about Ross from a professor, where Ross was supposed to be a researcher. “He forgets the research and gets involved with organizing,” the professor complained during a Chicago card game that included Alinsky. Always on the lookout for organizing talent, Alinsky’s ears perked up.

Ross was the on-the-ground organizer for what became the statewide Community Service Organization (CSO). Ross’ approach was distinct from what Alinsky did elsewhere: (I worked for Alinksyh in Kansas City, MO 1966/67.)

Ross had to bypass the California Central Valley Catholic hierarchy and pastors who didn’t want to tangle with it. The official church had close ties with agribusiness. Pastors couldn’t be part of a “sponsor committee” that invited Alinsky to work with their parishioners.

Instead, he sought support from lower level clergy, women religious and others further down the hierarchy, to gain “credentials” to work in parishes with Mexican-American members. He built a “direct membership” organization that individuals and families—Catholics and others— joined, and to which they paid dues.

Ganz worked for 14 years with Ross, then Chavez, to build what became the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). As I recall, at one point Ganz was the only Anglo on the UFW executive board.

After that long commitment, Marshall was purged in one of a number of purges that took place in the union as Chavez became more and more alarmed about an imagined Communist infiltration. Before being purged, he was himself a directed purges. An example of his character is in this story told to me, almost in disbelief, by one of those he purged:

Many years after Marshall purged me, I got a call from him. He wanted to get together. I was surprised and unsure whether to meet, but I agreed. Marshall apologized in depth for the purge and explained why he did what he did, and why it was wrong. Not many people in the labor movement do that kind of thing.

That event represents Marshall. He combines values from his Jewish religious background, a deep commitment to secular small “d” democracy and individual integrity to build people power organizations and campaigns, and to train others to do the same. For a number of years, he has taught at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard and both nationally and internationally consulted with and trained people in organizing efforts and campaigns.

The Teacher

Since his path through the material is a carefully constructed one, I’m going to follow it and, hopefully, provide you enough teasers to read the book.

Acknowledgements. “I’m grateful to Fred Ross with whom I learned the organizing ‘craft’—not only particular skills and practices, but how to imagine, learn, and develop new practices—and that organizing is a constant learning.”
Introduction: “Why Me, Why Us, Why Now?” Marshall attended the orientation session for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project where Bob Moses told the 300-or-so participants about the likely murder of two “outside white” and one local black staff members. Ganz: “I sank into my seat in utter silence. Just like everyone else in the room. I asked myself: ‘What am I doing here? Is this what I signed up for? What had I gotten myself into?’” He then traces his path that led to organizing, analyzing the “political pathology” of where the country now is along the way.
Practicing Democracy: “A pedagogy of practice is at the heart of learning to practice democracy: the way we learn is what we learn, and what we learn is the way we learn.” That approach, he tells us, was used in the “launching of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign…”
Relationships: At the farmworkers union, Marshall learned “that organizing was not only a matter of earnest, patient, persistent work with local people but also a discipline, a craft, a practice to be learned, trained in, and adapted.” One of my questions to the teacher deals with one of his lessons: an organization of organizations—Alinsky’s usual modus operandi—“requires accommodating the new organization to meet the interests of existing organizational leaders.”
Story Telling. For organizing purposes, “the stories we need to tell each other are about me, us and now.” Linked together, these reach deeply into people and provide the motivation for joining together and acting strategically. “Public narrative becomes a leadership practice when we link all three together into a coherent, cohesive, and compelling values-based narrative.” Marshall’s humor comes into play throughout the book: “You cannot learn public narrative looking into the mirror. We need coaching. A Yiddish riddle asks, ‘Who discovered water?’ Answer: ‘I don’t know, but it wasn’t a fish.’”
Strategizing. “Enabling right to make might is what strategy can be all about. As theologian Paul Tillich taught, power without love can never be just, but love without power can never achieve justice.” ‘Strategy’ comes from the Greek words stratos and agein. A general stood on top of a hill to get an overview of the battle, and make decisions based on it. Biblical “David realizes Goliath might be ‘just another bear’…[H]e reframes the battle.” David develops a larger strategy that shows a path to beating MAGA, Trump and all they represent.
Action: Here Marshall elaborates the importance of detail, of “getting it right”, of paying attention to your capacity for action in relation to the goal(s) you want to achieve. He tells a wonderful story of Fred Ross’ interaction with a trainee to illustrate the point.
Structure is the way “that legitimate decisions can be made in the name of the whole community, based on the equal authoritative value of each person’s voice and enacted in ways that both respect each person’s voice and can get things done.” Marshall reminds us of the must-read “Tyranny of Structurelessness” written in 1972 by feminist Jo Freeman, and as current as yesterday’s lousy meeting.
Developmental Leadership. Involving others to take more responsibility and, in turn, involve others is the key to making an organization grow. “As one of my students put it, the test of good leadership is not how many hats you can wear at the same time. It is how many people you can enable to wear hats.” Easily said, not so easy to practice.
Conclusion. In Where do we go from here, Marshall places the book in the dangerous context of the present: “Since the 1970s, we have created a political economy in which the interests of the many, who work, are subordinated to the interests of the few, who own…[W]e’ve allowed a trifecta that links economic structures that facilitate the accumulation of wealth at the top; electoral processes that have become almost entirely monetized; and a civil society dependent on the largesse of many of the same people benefiting from all the rest, but in philanthropic form…[operating] within a Constitutional structure that grows less representative of America every day.” In my view, much of that structure was already in place, even if restricted by a regulatory system.

Questions for the Teacher

Electoral Politics: America’s most dangerous seducer.

Marshall tells us, “Most electoral campaigns have no interest in building organization once the election is over, no matter what the claims (emphasis added).” I’m glad to see this. Why does it take so long for people who passionately pursue liberty, equality, justice and community to grasp this lesson?

An earlier Marshall wrote in an “opinion” piece in the November 3, 2010 Los Angeles Times, “How Obama lost his voice, and how he can get it back…Barack Obama went from being a transformational leader in the campaign to a transactional one as president. It didn’t work, and he must reverse course (emphasis added).

”…President Obama entered office in a mantle of moral leadership…Now, 18 months and an ‘enthusiasm gap’ later, the nation’s major challenges remain largely unmet, and a discredited conservative movement has reinvented itself in a more virulent form… Obama has tried to govern as a ‘transactional’ leader…while the nation was ready for transformation…[M]uch of the public’s anger, disappointment and frustration have been turned on a leader who failed to lead…attempted to negotiate change from the inside…chose compromise rather than advocacy…He ignored the leverage that a radical flank…could give a reform president—as organized labor empowered FDR’s New Deal or the civil rights movement empowered LBJ’s Voting Rights Act.”

But FDR was unwilling to challenge the Deep South Dixiecrats. It took a march threatened by Pullman Porters Union President A. Philip Randolph to get FDR to include fair employment as part of Federally-funded wartime jobs. LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, strengthened by a major Supreme Court decision at the time, didn’t deal with the jobs with justice part of the 1963 March on Washington program or the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s economic justice platform.

By late 2010, why didn’t Ganz know better? Speaking of Obama in a November 2008 speech to the Harlem Tenants Association, Robert Fitch asked, “What’s President-elect Obama’s prescription for urban pains?”

Obama, Fitch explains, is a communitarian who believes “we all share a common good. What’s needed to achieve the common good…is sacrifice…Obama insists that the key to change is not resistance to oppression; not a battle against worker exploitation; or against institutional racism, or the domination of unaccountable financial elites; or the interests promoting gentrification. These all fade away compared to the need for community self-help, strengthening the community by building strong families; by convincing the African-American poor to pull up their socks…He says to Professor John McKnight, ‘You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we made sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars’.”

Fitch details urban renewal plans that would have “ripped through the Chicago black belt, demolishing private housing…” and asks, But what does all this have to do with Obama? Just this: the area demolished included the communities that Obama represented as a state senator…

“If we examine more carefully the interests Obama represents; if we look at his core financial supporters; as well as his inmost circle of advisors, we’ll see that they represent the primary activists in the demolition movement and the primary real estate beneficiaries of this transformation of public housing projects into condos and townhouses: the profitable creep of the Central Business District and elite residential neighborhoods southward; and the shifting of the pile of human misery about three miles further into the South Side and the south suburbs.”

The organization Ganz and others put together to elect Obama was not a mass-based people power organization. That he (and they) thought a people-based electoral mobilization organization would be turned into one requires further explanation.

Here’s Obama himself writing in Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City (1990 Illinois Issues): “Finally, community organizations and organizers are hampered by their own dogmas about the style and substance of organizing. Most still practice what Professor John McKnight calls a ‘consumer advocacy’ approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from outside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.”

There are other ways to impact electoral outcomes than staffing a politician’s campaign. See what the Industrial Areas Foundation’s Chicago Citizen Action Program did to defeat Mayor Richard Daley (Sr)’s crosstown freeway.

Decision-making.

Marshall’s discussion of democracy is a rich one. Majority rule and minority rights are at its core. It also can lead to bitter fights and resentments, which he explains require more than simple majorities to prevent splits and build consensus.

As I read, I wished Ganz would have gone more deeply into the discussion of, for example, Occupy and its consensus decision-making which created as many problems as it solved.

I am struck by the way the Venezuelan worker-owned cooperative CECOSESOLA addresses this. Decision-making is by consensus (something I’ve long been skeptical of). It is reached by conversations that often are long. Implementation, however, is assigned to one, two or three people who are trusted to reflect the intent of the consensus in their implementation. Is this a way to eat our cake and have it too? Majority close votes that lead to action that alienates a significant minority are not what we want (nor does Ganz imply that).

Direct Membership versus “organizations of organizations”—Fred Ross versus Saul Alinsky.

Ganz makes too much of the distinction, telling us the latter “requires accommodating the new organization to meet the interests of existing organizational leaders.” Yes and no.

In Kansas City, MO, where I was staff director of one of these “O of O’s”, and from stories Alinsky told, I learned how such an organization was more than simply the adding up of existing interests. Example: Rev. John W. Williams was pastor of St. Stephen’s Baptist Church, one of (if not THE) the most important Black churches in the city. He initially refused to be part of the Black community group inviting Alinsky to work there (this invitational process was “organizing” even before a full-time organizer was on the scene). Alinsky told his Black clergy supporters he would not come to Kansas City if Williams wasn’t part of the group inviting IAF to be there. Consternation followed. The Black clergymen would now have to challenge Rev. Williams.

They did. Williams and Alinsky had a private meeting in which Alinsky responded to all the rumors and incorrect ideas Williams had heard about his work. A deal was made: Rev. Solon Fox, one of St. Stephen’s clergymen, would be nominated as the new organization's Treasurer at its founding convention. With support from almost all the Black churches, there was no doubt he would be elected.

In effect, Alinsky moved Williams to the “left” without there being an IAF organizer present in Kansas City. The move and the organization he joined represented a qualitative change in the then-politics of Kansas City’s Black community.

Another O of O story: in one of IAF’s Texas “organization of organizations” the Catholic Bishop described what happened when he transferred a supportive pastor from one the organization’s member parishes. “I was approached by a delegation of parishioners who wanted a voice in naming their pastor’s successor. That would never have happened before.” The parishioners transferred the democratic lessons from the community organization to the internal processes of the Diocesan decision-making hierarchy. And this is not an unusual story about these organizations.

Finally, in my late 1960’s/early 1970’s staff director work in San Francisco’s largely Latino Mission District, Mission Coalition Organization (MCO) organizers built from scratch tenant associations, block clubs, youth groups and other organizations that became MCO members.

The “O of O” form became especially helpful when the mayor tried to divide the community over the Federal Model Cities program (which many saw as the elephant in the room for urban renewal). The O of O form and its multi-issue character were indispensable.

When the mayor’s staff person approached the Mission Street Merchant’s Association with this idea, its President came to MCO, of which the Association was a member organization, to discuss the mayor’s proposal. He rejected the mayor’s idea of two coalitions, one for model cities and the other for action on issues. Frank Hunt did that because MCO picketing put a “girlie movie” on Mission Street out of business , and stopped the City’s urban renewal authority from relocating pawn shops it was displacing from South of Market to the neighborhood’s principal shopping street.

When the mayor’s staff approached St. Peter’s pastor Fr. Jim Casey with the same idea, he rejected it as well. Casey told Mike McCone, “MCO won jobs for our people and prevented rent hikes and evictions in buildings where they live. We’re part of it.”

Direct membership organizations have their critics as well. Wade Rathke built ACORN as such an organization. He learned this approach from Bill Pastreich who, in turn, was supervised by Fred Ross in a Syracuse University community organizing course for which Alinsky was the professor. Within 20 years, ACORN was an actor on the national political stage. An IAF organizer friend of mine said “ACORN is like lightly falling rain; it doesn’t hit the ground.” But you feel it on your face. Too many “community organizations” remain in the stratosphere, neither noticed or felt by anyone.

Conclusion: Thanks, Professor, for the Course

Especially because of the times in which we now live, People, Power, Change is an important book. Thanks, Marshall, for this gift to us, to the democratic promise, and to the people of this country and elsewhere where you work.

Mike Miller is a longtime community organizer based in San Francisco, learn more about his work at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..