In a life dedicated to organizing people to make change—from working with SNCC and the United Farm Workers to Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown, and President Obama—Marshall Ganz has seen and learned a lot, lessons he’s passed on for decades as a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School. Today, democracy teeters as our capacity for collective action seems to have withered away. In his new book, People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal, Ganz has distilled a half-century’s worth of insights into an urgent call for strengthening democracy, both a practical guide on how to reclaim democratic power and an inspiring manifesto for collective organizing.
In his book, Ganz argues that lasting and meaningful change only happens when people come together for a shared purpose, when they deliberate together, and when they act together, even when the future seems unknowable and the road uncertain. On November 13, 2024, just days after Donald Trump was elected president, at a public event hosted by Stanford PACS, Ganz was interviewed about building power and leadership by Tomás R. Jiménez, professor of sociology and comparative studies in race and ethnicity and the founding codirector of Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies. Their conversation has been edited for clarity.
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Tomás: When people call for structural change, what do they get wrong right now about how it comes about?
Marshall: Where do we start? My first reaction is that they forget that it’s about people. They think it’s about branding, sound bites, clever memes. They think it’s about getting the right funder to fund you. But really, structural change is rooted in people, human beings, and the power we can create with each other when we find values we share, and our capacity to turn those values into sources of power.
Power is another really misunderstood thing. Power is not a thing you have; it’s an influence created through interdependence. We live in the world interdependently with others, and those interdependencies can be very fruitful: My resources, your needs, your needs, my resources. But at times, the resources we need are held by others who use that to substitute their will for our own and their interest for our own. That we call power. The challenge in organizing is understanding that power does not exist out there, in some bank or something. Resources are there, but this capacity to grow interdependence into sources of power, that's what we learned how to do in the [United Farm Workers of America]. I mean, if I have a food store, the only food store in town, it gives me a lot of power, right? Because they need what I got. But then Gandhi comes to town, everybody goes on a fast, and my power is gone.
Power is not getting a grant. More often than not, that creates dependency on the donor, instead of on your own community. Faith communities and unions are probably all that’s left in terms of self-governing, membership-based organizations where the funding comes from the people themselves. Instead, what's become typical is that somebody sets up a good thing, to go and help people, and then, when a foundation gives them some money, they become a spokesperson for that community. But they haven’t earned it. You earn it by organizing community, and the hollowing out of civil society is really a problem.
Tomás: In the book, you lay out key ingredients for effective organizing, for structural change, talking about relationships, storytelling, strategizing, action, and structure. But one might read the book and say that, sure, those are all important ingredients, but we won’t do things like that anymore. Relationships. I can build relationships in a minute, maybe a little bit more than a minute on social media, right? It’s easy to do storytelling: Post a TikTok or an Instagram. Strategizing: I put something out there, and I get people to act, I can reach millions of people in a heartbeat with a click of a button. And is structure a strength? Without structure, we avoid power and the hierarchies that can attain in social movements and all the dysfunction that comes from that go.
Marshall: Macro-outcomes are the result of micro-practices. The word strategy comes from the Greek strata, which is the word for field; the general was called stratigos, and he would go sit on a hill, come up with an overview of the battle, come up with a theory of change, and generating a hypothesis about what it would take to win. And then the soldiers were called tacticas, and this is where we get strategy and tactics, strategy. This makes a lot of sense. The problem comes when there's a cloud that settles between the mountaintop and the valley, when the mountaintop says, Hey, we're up here, we know big things with big thoughts, and then people in the valley say You don’t know anything. We’re down here with intimate detail. The reality is, they need each other to know anything close to the whole truth. To think strategically is to combine those elements. And these days, there are so many tactics in search of strategy. You know, “Let’s have a rally!” Why? Well, we always do that. “Let’s have a petition.” Why? Well, we always do that.
That’s not strategy. That’s habit. Strategy is creative and it’s dynamic. Many times, what really matters, what may be even more important than the goal is, did we come out of this stronger or weaker? Have you ever had a “success” where you never want to see anybody ever again who was involved? You have to ask yourself: What did we build?
When people say “we have a great community online,” I say: Oh, really? It might be a gathering, or a party, but a community requires commitment. It requires undertaking obligations, otherwise we’re not building anything. A problem with thinking of structure as this oppressive thing is that it means we’re not building. You know, it’s like “we have a campaign!” Did we come out of it with an organization? “No, we had a great campaign.” Unless we’re building collective capacity, it’s not enough to just have campaign after campaign, and you can’t do that without structure, because structure is the commitments we make to one another about how we're going to work together. That's it.
How are we going to make decisions? How are we going to hold ourselves accountable? How are we going to organize the work? If we can’t make commitments about how we're going to work together with each other, well, you know, good luck.
Marshall Ganz, left, and Tomás R. Jiménez, professor of sociology and comparative studies in race and ethnicity and the founding codirector of Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies.Tomás: Can we drill down a little bit on leadership? Occupy kind of bragged about the fact that it was a leaderless movement. But when I think about United Farm Workers, I think of Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and you, too; when I think about the poor people's campaign, I think of the Reverend William Barber. And these are not just leaders, but figureheads and icons. One feature of some of the movements I see today is the absence of that.
Marshall: I think we get very confused when we think the great, heroic leader will lead us out of the wilderness. That wasn’t even true of Moses. Jesus had an organizing committee of 12, you know. The prophet had his companions. When I was in India, I went to visit Sarnath, where Buddha had his first school, and it was a school, it wasn’t just some guy just sitting under a tree somewhere. We individualize something that has always been more collaborative and more collective to start with.
Our approach to leadership is rooted in Rabbi Hillel’s three questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” This is the need to be present, to be aware. “But if I am for myself alone, what am I?” This reminds us that to be a who and not a what, human beings must be recognized, that we’re relational creatures, and we exist in relationship. Finally, “If not now, when?” We can’t predict the future, but the way we can engage with the future is to act and learn from that action. Understanding flows from action, rather than preceding it. Otherwise you sit around forever, waiting for the perfect plan.
Our definition for leadership is accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty, leadership as empowerment not domination. Now if you see a “leaderless movement,” for the most part, all you’re seeing is leadership that’s not visible, or not structured, in which case it quickly becomes factionalized and dysfunctional. The real question of leadership is, are you developing more leadership, or are you driving away more leadership?
Team leadership is a much more grounded, collaborative way of structuring leadership. It’s not flaky. It means clear roles, clear work, clear norms on decision making, all the rest of that. But from the beginning, it gets that leadership is about interdependence, not about me being the boss. I think one of the most hopeful things in the world from my perspective is how the Women’s movement is challenging lots of traditional forms of domination, and that is really important, that energy.
Tomás: I want to ask about the election, but more about the response to the election. The news in California right now is a story of fortification. Gavin Newsom is in Washington right now, working with the current administration to figure out how to “fortify” California against what is likely to be an assault on the rights that have been built up in California. But this is a discourse, a language of “holding our ground,” a language from 2016 to 2020 of resistance. I wonder whether you think that’s the right language?
Marshall: It’s like I got the questions ahead of time!
Tomás: Instead of holding our ground and fortifying, can we actually build something constructive? Can we actually make progress under what is likely to be a very challenging time?
Marshall: You know, with addiction, there’s this moment called “rock bottom,” and I’m hoping this is rock bottom. The benefit of rock bottom is that it delegitimizes what’s gone before. It says: We’ve got to do something different. We’ve got to do something very different. The tendency is to want to patch up here, do a little bit there. But we’re well beyond that. And I think it’s important to understand, first, why we are where we are.
The first thing it’s so important to understand is that we don’t have a representative democracy. We’ve never had representative democracy; at best, we’ve had a republic that’s kind of an oligarchic republic. That may be shocking, but, you know, you got California, you got two votes. Rhode Island, you got two votes. What’s democratic about that electoral college? You got six states deciding who’s going to be president. What’s democratic about that? You have these first by the post districts. 51 percent is 100 percent; 49 percent is zero representation. We have all these constitutional constraints that were designed to protect the slaveholding south and make a deal on that. We have this legacy, and we’ve got to not misdiagnose what is going on; we have a system that’s skewed toward minority control. I don’t mean ethnic minority, I mean anti-democratic minority.
The second thing is that we’re the only liberal democracy that has no constraints on campaign spending, that the Supreme Court said that money is speech. That means you can’t have free speech and control money, because money is speech. No other liberal democracy has that; they all have campaign constraints. We don’t. What it’s done is create a multi-billion dollar electoral advertising industry or marketing industry; the more money that’s spent, the more money they make. What it does is monetize the political process. Instead of being about people engaging with other people, it becomes this marketing messaging, highly rarefied, ultimately, very transactional.
The last thing I’ll say, again, is that civil society has been impoverished by donors replacing constituencies. Instead of having an organized base for whom I speak, we have “whoever gave me the latest grant so that I can now speak for people who can’t speak for themselves.” Organizing is about enabling people to speak for themselves. It’s not a charity project. It’s a justice project, and that’s what drew me to civil rights. It wasn’t poor people. It was the people who had the courage to fight this stuff. The first SNCC staff meeting I ever went to, I thought there’d be all these strategy charts and stuff. It was in a church, and I went in, and, you know what they were doing? They were having a preach-off. You know what a preach-off is? Who could imitate Dr King better! There was humor, there was joy and there was courage. That’s where the action is. It’s not feeling sorry for people, it’s lifting people up.
The rebuilding of civil society, to me, is fundamental, including something that might be a real party. Because we don’t have parties here. We have two markets for branding, and entrepreneurs compete for the brand in the markets, but in terms of being an organization that has members, that’s capable? I was up in Toronto a couple weeks ago, and they have real parties there. I know Canadians will complain about their parties, but they actually have an organization where you can go to a meeting and you can nominate your person to be in Parliament. You can go to a conference and choose who’s going to be the leader. That’s a party, the way parties can function. In the UK, you can run for parliament with $20,000; you don’t get a parking spot here for $20,000.
This is not to do “gloom and doom.” We’ve got to be clear, we’ve got to be real, and we’ve got to come to terms with what it’s going to take to do some rebuilding. The question is: What are we for? Who are we for? What are our values? How do we do that?
I think there’s four options. One is to leave. The second one is to fight; not resist, but fight. Resisting is a defensive, it’s already ceding the ground before you’ve even begun. Fighting is no, we’re taking this on because we value what we value, and we're going to fight for it. Third is building. After Trump was elected the first time, there was a whole lot of mobilizing, but it didn’t turn into building infrastructure to developing leadership. And unless you’re building at the same time you’re fighting, you wind up with nothing. The last one is you can give up. I prefer two and three as a nice combination.
People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal by Marshall Ganz
Are You Building Something? was originally published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review and is shared with permission.
