Zack Exley

An Organizer’s Guide to Trusting the People 27 September, 2006

Often, we progressives fall back on blaming the American people for our failure to win elections or grow our movement. This is not only a self-defeating bad habit, it’s also based on a totally inaccurate understanding of The People. I frequently find myself trying to squeeze this argument into a single paragraph in posts and articles. It never fits. Therefore, I’m going to flesh it out here, and then perhaps I can just link over whenever I want to give people an option to hear me out.

For most of the 90′s I worked as a union organizer all over America, from big cities to far flung small towns — organizing workers at hospitals, nursing homes, factories, meat processing plants, big box stores, and working at many of those facilities myself.

I sat in the living rooms of probably a thousand families altogether. Visiting workers at home was the only way to talk safely about the union. But conversations frequently strayed from the revolution they were trying to make at work to what they thought of the problems facing the country too. People have a lot of ways of making sense of the world. They grab at straws and whatever is available to them, whether that’s Rush Limbaugh, shortwave survivalists, the History Channel, or the Bible. It’s easy to dismiss people because they’ve put together a world view from an entirely different set of building blocks from your own. And that’s exactly what I did for at least my first year as an organizer.

Like most of my fellow upper-middleclass, college-educated colleagues, I threw workers into a narrow stereotype of apolitical, apathetic “middle America.” We had grown up with it for so long, we didn’t even know we had it. This is why so much of our time as organizers was spent trying to change the way people thought before we got to the nuts and bolts of organizing the union. In the tradition of Saul Alinsky, we were trained to “dialog” with workers to help them reveal for themselves the fact of their oppression, and the one sure thing they could do about it: take collective action. (If you go to Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals or look into the work of Paulo Friere, who also greatly influenced the current generations of organizers, you’ll find the intellectual foundation for this kind of organizing.) Our job, as we were taught it, was to facilitate a self-awakening into political consciousness among the workers.

A complete change in psychology was a lot to pull off in a six week union campaign, and so we almost always lost when it came down to a vote by the workers. Afterwards, I’d hear many a young organizer lament, “What’s wrong with these people? Why are they voting against their own interests? How can they be so brainwashed?” And I was thinking the exact same thing. (And this is, of course, the same lament we hear after political elections as people curse entire ‘red’ states.)

But eventually, I started listening — really listening. My own awakening really started when I went to work inside a factory where a union campaign was taking place. There, I was able to see and hear the real reasons workers were rejecting the union. It wasn’t because they were scared or apathetic. It was usually because either (A) they saw real flaws with the union’s strategy (which suddenly, from the inside looked a lot more valid than when I was outside); or (B) technical glitches in timing and execution on the part of the union simply flummoxed the campaign in ways I hadn’t been able to see on the outside.

My awakening continued while back working as a staff organizer, when I was lucky enough to be confronted by a few groups of workers who asserted themselves in ways that made a mockery of the stereotypes I was still trying to hang on to.

To give an example, at the beginning of one campaign, a group of nursing home workers presented me with a fully laid-out, worker-written newsletter on a floppy disk — and demanded 800 copies by the next day to distribute to their coworkers. Writing “campaign lit” was the job of the organizer. So I felt immediately threatened. My next reaction was to want to edit the newsletter to make it more “on message” for the union. It was filled with short and long articles on everything from simple explanations of why they wanted a union (I wanted to bring those more in line with the official talking points) to emotional essays on why life as a care giver was so satisfying (I worried those would make people forget about the grievances that had sparked the union campaign).

The workers said, “No edits! Just print this out and we’ll distribute it.” The newsletter was an incredible hit. Workers were hiding in closets to read them. People came to the office for extra copies to give to family members. The newsletter turned out to be an incredibly powerful organizing tool because it showed people being a union, not just talking about one. It allowed the workers who were leading the union campaign to express a fully-formed tone and attitude of what the union was all about. For example, the article about pride in care giving showed people that the union was not only about grievances, but about also about care giving, the thing the workers cared about the most.

It was not a fluke. In every campaign after that, we always asked workers for articles and they wrote them in droves. The worker-written newsletter became the cornerstone of every campaign I ran from that point on.

Those and other experiences like them gradually woke me up. I started approaching groups of workers with the assumption that they were, taken as a whole, savvy and strategic, not apolitical and apathetic. That opened the door to all kinds of great collaborations. I started assuming these groups of people were strong, deep, strategic and concerned — “even if they were” made up of Evangelical Christians, survivalists, muscle car drivers, trailer park dwellers, pit bull breeders, and anything else my Northeastern Liberal upbringing had taught me to ridicule.

Suddenly, I was finding evidence everywhere of that strength and depth. Not only did I have more interesting conversations with people, but I also started winning union campaigns — usually by overwhelming margins. As a — I’ll admit it — snot nosed lefty kid fresh from the suburbs, it was shocking (and exciting!) for me find that every rural route and city block had its Mother Jones, and every single hospital ward or factory assembly line had its Joe Hill. I wanted to run back to college and tell my labor history professors, “Guess what! Nothing’s changed since 1934 after all!”

There has NOT been a radical change in the spirit of the people since the days of romantic, revolutionary mass organizing in America. What’s changed is that the middle-class, university-educated segment within the struggle (i.e. US) stopped playing our vital role (not THE vital role, just A vital role) because somehow we got our heads filled with all this nonsense about the people being apathetic jackasses.

After I finally left the unions, and wound up moving to the beltway, I found the same cynicism I had grown up with still alive and well among progressives there. I’d frequently trot out my evidence from the front lines. Mostly, people would just look back at me incredulously. I was working for MoveOn at the time and acquiring more evidence by the day — thanks to MoveOn’s trusting its members to run their own local events across the country. Enormous numbers of activists were taking part all the time, even in the smallest towns in the reddest states. But none of my arguments seemed to get me anywhere with people at parties cursing the “fly over states”.

For a little while I thought the Dean campaign and the massive surge of grassroots activism everywhere in 2004 might finally change progressives’ minds about the people.

But then came November 2, and the near-universal response among progressives: Blame Jesusland!

To be fair, there are actually many very good reasons why progressives find it hard to trust The People. For example, one thing that makes many progressive believe that the American people are apathetic and weak is that…well…so many people are in fact apathetic and weak. But, as it happens, groups of people are not equal to their lowest common denominators — or even to their means. Groups are much greater than the aggregate of their individual members. Someone canvassing voters in a campaign can quickly become depressed by the apathy of 9/10th of the people she talks to. But part of the art of organizing is to be able to look through that optical illusion and to see the group as a whole. It’s the same kind of complex vision one must have in any field. But somehow it’s been lost in the field of organizing.

Therefore, it’s time to relearn some of the important principles that have enabled organizers over the centuries and all around the world see the forest through the trees — or The People in the population.

1) All groups of people — even very small ones — are strong and brilliant. Sometimes that can be hard to see because the same is not true of all individuals.

Not everyone is always going to be a leader, an organizer, a strategist, a fighter. Fact is, a whole lot of people spend most of their lives behaving downright cowardly and apathetic. The whole point of this article, though, is that you make a big mistake when you use that fact to dismiss The People as a whole — or even any small group of people. That’s not how it works. “The People” (as in “We, the…”) is a structure of individuals working together in a complex way.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not putting some people above others as people. Just as organizers. Every individual is a deep and amazing person in the sense of having lives just as full of passion, need, joy and pain as yours. And that, by the way, is the key to grasping the principle of equal worth of all people (in case you were having trouble with that!).

In fact, it is that commitment to equal worth that drives Alinskyite and Frierian organizers to want so badly to raise up every single broken soul. Yes, those people will need to go through a transformation before they become leaders in any movement. However, the mistake those organizers make, is to misunderestimate the leadership that already exists in every nook and cranny of every group. It just so happens that even when you get down to 10 people who work in a nursing home wing or live on a cul-de-sac together, you find that one or two of them are very good at running meetings, another is a great writer, another is an astute strategist, and so on in overlapping and random fashion.

Leadership is what makes even tiny groups of people strong and brilliant — but just to be doubly clear: by leadership, I’m not talking about politicians and head of big organization. (Though that’s important too!) Rather, I’m talking about the leaders on every assembly line, every hospital ward, every classroom, every apartment building floor, every stretch of rural route, etc, etc….

2) Leadership is not a role played only by “leaders,” but equally by “followers” in the act of temporarily and voluntarily granting to leaders their special role. Also: leadership is ephemeral in individuals and is sometimes expressed by the most unlikely people.

Organizers today tend not to recognize and respect the strength and dignity that “non-leaders” exercise through their conscious, voluntary and temporary allegiance to those possessed by the property of leadership at a given moment. That bias is part of what explains the general anti-leadership attitude among progressives these days — there is a widespread sense that leadership implies a lack of democracy or egalitarianism. In fact, organic grassroots leadership is what makes democracy possible.

It might help if I was more concrete. When I was working in factories during campaigns, I saw that when the union came around, immediately workers began to look to certain individuals to get their opinion on the matter. Sometimes the leaders supported the union, sometimes they rejected it, and sometimes they abstained. Those leaders therefore had the power to come together and make the union — but only because the rest of the folks were giving them that power at that moment. Those leaders didn’t “run the workplace.” They weren’t power-hungry gang leaders. Many of them actually had very small social foot prints at work. But, for all different kinds of reasons, these leaders had built up credibility and respect among the workers with regards to this particular kind of turbulent political situation.

Furthermore, the leadership of a group is not a static list. In campaigns, if you’re open to the possibility, you find that leadership is something that pops up in the most unexpected people at the most unexpected times. I remember one day when the whole future of a campaign relied on one worker reading a statement confidently and clearly to the boss in front of an assembly of workers. So who did we choose? Of course, the most confident and articulate worker on the organizing committee. When the time came, he froze and couldn’t open his mouth. He stood there with the paper shaking in his hands. The woman standing next to him took the paper from his hands and read it just as clearly and confidently as could be. What was shocking about this was that, while very respected for being a hard worker with seniority, she was known for anything but her way with words or confidence in front of other people.

3) Groups will fight for a cause only if (A) it is worth of fighting for and (B) they can see a winning plan.

When I was organizing nursing home workers, and asking them to vote for the union so that they could merely “have respect and a say on the job,” the leaders usually rejected us. But when we laid out a long term plan for organizing the whole industry in the state, and for using that power to transform the lives of care givers and patients — then the leaders chose to fight, and supported the union every time.

Think about that: In the first case, we were asking them to do almost nothing, but they wouldn’t do it; In the second case, we were asking them to commit to a 10-year ordeal, and they were all for it. The small campaign wasn’t worth their time or the risks involved; the big campaign was.

This principle also holds the answer to the inevitable question, “If the people are so strong and brilliant, then why did they vote for Bush?” First of all, they didn’t. Only about a quarter of U.S. adults voted for Bush. A lot of them were just flipping coins in their heads. Some were voting on just a few issues — the ones where the difference could be gleaned from the moments of news people catch between 11-hour work days, dinner and putting the kids to bed: Bush was going to kill the terrorists, Kerry was not so sure; Bush was anti-abortion, Kerry was pro-choice; Bush supposedly believed in Jesus, Kerry supposedly believed only in going to Church in an election season; Bush cut everyone’s taxes, Kerry was going to raise some people’s taxes.

The People didn’t make a dumb decision. Half abstained. And most of the other half chose the lesser of two evils based on the issues they cared about and the information that was available to them.

The way for a Democrat to win with a sweeping majority is to lay out a sweeping plan for real change, with a good strategy, and ask the people to fight for it. It’s been forever since anybody’s tried that. (But it is worth noting that when Howard Dean merely hinted at something like that, he ignited a revolution among the Democratic base.) Third party efforts haven’t been any different: can anyone remember the big plan to change America from Labor Party Advocates, the New Party or the Green Party/Ralph Nader 2000 campaign? Unfortunately, the world of progressive grassroots organizations is in the same boat.

Coming out with a big revolutionary plan is unthinkable for us because we don’t trust the people to fight for it. We believe in “starting small.” It’s become an explicit methodological dogma of the progressive movement: The idea is that people must first be given “small, winnable battles” and gradually, after they’ve tasted a little success, can be encouraged to bite off bigger and bigger campaigns.

But that thinking has lead us down a self-defeating spiral of un-inspiration. Here’s how it works: We lose campaigns because the people can’t be bothered to take on the “small battles” we give them. But our backwards thinking leads us to conclude that we should go back to them with even smaller battles. And as we travel this downward spiral, we find that fewer and fewer people want to participate, and that the quality of the leaders who join us diminishes too.

Because of our (false) understanding of what’s happening, it appears to us that The People are getting more and more timid and becoming worse and worse leaders. We blame TV, bad schools, religion and rampant consumerism. We actually believe that the soul of the people is changing over time. Think about how widespread and rock solid that assumption is: is there any question in our minds that people are more timid and bought-off now than they were in the days when millions of workers comprising several whole industries struck in unison for entrance into the middle class?

Because of our perception of this dumbing-down of the people, we focus more and more intensively on on “consciousness raising” and “leadership development” — to the exclusion of working with leaders who are already plenty conscious and already amazing leaders. We’ve been shrinking down our expectations until they’re practically non-existent. We been doing this for decades.

To start to get out of this trap, we’ve just got to open our minds to the possibility that the people are just as radical as they were when millions took part in sit-down strikes and the Unemployed Councils. We’ve got to recognize the possibility that the wisest, boldest leaders have been consciously refusing to participate in our campaigns because our goals have been too modest and our strategies shaky as hell.

When I look back at all the organizing that I did under the assumption that The People were weak and apathetic, I remember that, by and large, the people I was able to recruit tended to be…well…kind of weak and apathetic. But when I started organizing with the assumption that people would rise to the task of a big campaign, then amazing leaders came out of the woodwork.

Consider the possibility that the reason the leaders you’re used to need so much “development” is that only non-leaders are interested in your short-term, bite-sized campaigns. In other words, people who are un-strategic, people who have no credibility among their peers to loose, people who perhaps just have a lot of time on their hands and are bored — those are the people who are willing to risk everything for nothing, and who can’t tell the difference between a good strategy and a bad one. (Again, none of that makes them less-valuable as people, just as organizers.)

When I first saw a union campaign from inside of a facility where I was a worker, I was shocked by how differently the true workplace leaders appeared to the union organizers from how I knew them to be. I had been working in the factory for months, and I knew who the leaders were. I had seen them defend their coworkers against management attacks (risking their jobs in the process), resolve conflicts among coworkers, and welcome and train new workers. They were already running what was effectively an informal union that they had built themselves.

But when union organizers knocked on their doors, almost all these leaders said, “Everything at work is fine. I don’t want any trouble. I don’t want to lose my job. Go away.” At work I saw the conversations among those leaders that lead to the anti-union consensus. Their logic was reasonable and correct: They were concerned that the union was only organizing their one factory, out of many owned by the same company. “How,” they asked, “will we have any power when they can just move all our work to the other factories?” And they were turned off by the fact that, in the first couple days of the campaign, the union had already embraced as leaders a few people who were extremely bad news — i.e. those people who had no credibility to lose and too much time on their hands.

There. I’ve done my best to justify the leap of faith I’m asking you to take. I know there are a whole lot of organizers who didn’t grow up with my same set of deficiencies and who didn’t need to read this article at all — to you folks I apologize for the time you’ve wasted here. But it’s clear that the progressive movement overall is still suffering from a lack of trust and faith in The People. Take a leap of faith, trust The People, and I guarantee that as long as you combine that with good organizing, you won’t be disappointed.