This is cross-posted from Dissent Magazine's Symposium: Organizing and Therapeutic Politics
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We have asked a number of organizing scholars and practitioners to comment on Zelda Bronstein’s “Politics’ Fatal Therapeutic Turn” (and exchange with Marshall Ganz) from the Summer 2011 issue of Dissent. The responses were written either before or during the incipient stages of the occupations now taking place across the United States—events that carry with them the potential for a remobilization of the American Left. We hope that the arguments below will help carry forward discussions about where (and how) to go from here.
How Good Storytelling Can Help Save the Left
Zelda Bronstein begins her recent article “Politics’ Fatal Therapeutic Turn” with a timely and compelling question: Why, at a time when bold organizing and activism are needed more than ever, are “the partisans of democracy…largely demobilized and defensive?”
Her answer is less satisfying: individuals and organizations on the left have turned politics into therapy “as a source of personal validation and emotional succor” rather than the “strenuous citizenship essential to democracy.” Her claim rests on two case studies, but her broadside against MoveOn and Marshall Ganz is the more interesting and most troubling part of her article.
MoveOn and Ganz, Bronstein writes, “use techniques of mutual self-disclosure to propel individuals into a politics where aggravation is alleviated by the balm of righteous sentiment.” Yet, her problem appears to be more with MoveOn than with Ganz. Bronstein uses Ganz to critique MoveOn, then blames him for MoveOn’s failure to follow his model of organization.
The more provocative challenge in Bronstein’s piece is not her misreading of Ganz or his organizing model; it is her rejection of organizing as “creating relationships through public narrative” and her dismissal of the importance of community and collective story in the formation of collective action. She writes that “community grows out of trust, and trust out of shared action, not shared stories.” Then she quotes Christopher Lasch —“the concept of ‘community’ evokes ‘intimacy and togetherness’ [while]…political life thrives on controversy,” suggesting that a focus on community building is not the same (nor presumably does it support) something more “strenuous.” Bronstein clearly places herself on the side of action and controversy—what she refers to as “grubby politics.”
Bronstein’s caricature is a classic example of the false “either/or” dichotomy that has plagued left politics for generations and western civilization for a lot longer. It’s head versus heart; the same lines drawn between the “hard” Old Left focus on direct action and class and the “soft” New Left emphasis on culture. Is the choice truly between pragmatic “politics” and the theoretical, idealistic, intimate relationships of “community?” When are we going to learn we need both and more?
In fairness, I think Bronstein would probably agree. But so does Ganz. Even a cursory reading of Ganz’s writings, or a brief conversation with him, would make clear that he practices both “head” and “heart”—action and strategy deeply rooted in relationship. Bronstein’s claim that Ganz “gives priority to personal affect and motivation” gets us nowhere. Changing the world requires healing this divide.
Wellstone Action, the progressive training institute created after the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, tries to do this. Wellstone used to say, “Electoral politics without community organizing is a politics without a base; community organizing without electoral politics is a marginalized politics. And community organizing and electoral politics without a clear, progressive public policy agenda is a politics without a head, without a direction.” Wellstone Action combines all three and now trains out of this model, which it calls the “Wellstone Triangle.”
Changing the world requires both organizing and mobilizing. Organizing is about building relationships, finding common cause, and developing new leaders. Mobilizing is about moving self and others to collective action around common cause. The power is in bringing these together. If all we focus on is mass mobilization, we will quickly find a fractured and oftentimes dwindling following behind us—if there is any following at all. This is the classic challenge of large organizations that try to create nationally driven “movement” campaigns, which seldom have anything moving on the ground more than slogans and heaps of cash. Conversely, if we build relationships and fail to move people to action through a pragmatic analysis of power, we will have a really good holiday card list and large Facebook following, but will not shift power or deliver real policy outcomes.
Let’s go beyond the head and the heart and flesh out the whole body. In this analogy, issues are represented by our head. Most of us think and care about lots of issues; we take action on far fewer. We choose to act on those issues that connect most directly with what matters to us, our interests (or gut) and our values (or heart). Until an issue touches our heart, we may still “care,” but we will not act. Personal narrative sharpens motivation by connecting head, heart, and gut. Bronstein may call this therapy; I call it Organizing 101, and it has long preceded either Ganz or me.
Moving people to action always begins with the recognition that there is something wrong. This is the beginning of a story that connects the challenge we face with our ability to change it. But this story cannot end with self-realization. Collective action requires a collective story, and, as organizers, we learn to elicit individuals’ experiences and weave them together. We create spaces—literally—for people to recognize in another a piece of themselves. This begins building community, and is the way we find common cause in the collective challenge we now recognize together. It is one way to break out of the relentless isolation and individuation of social experience that has occurred over four decades of a neoliberal economic regime with its story of market fundamentalism.
Identifying shared challenges gets us started; it does not change the world. We need to lay out a clear choice, an agenda worth fighting for. The Left has been relatively successful at defending the New Deal 1.0, but has not developed our New Deal 2.0. We have not succeeded in developing a new collective story, a point I believe Bronstein and Ganz would agree on. We need to provide a credible alternative and then create opportunities for people to act, and to act now. This is how movement-building power and change begins to happen. To succeed, we must first believe that story, narrative, and community matter to politics.
The diagram below illustrates this type of movement-building change and is inspired, in part, by Marshall Ganz’s work on “strategic capacity.” Put simply, change happens when enough people are motivated (have the urgency and commitment) to develop an effective strategy and deploy their resources (their capacity) to act on the right target (where we choose to spend our resources within existing power relationships) at the right time (where we find and create political opportunity).
What Ganz calls strategic capacity depends on the right combination of leadership and organization to “turn what we have into what we need to get what we want.” Sydney Tarrow calls these resources our “repertoire of contention,” which every social movement requires along with common purpose and sustained collective action. These resources include
• motivation (what compels and sustains our action)
• cultural knowledge (the salient information from particular communities)
• training and education (what others have taught us)
• financial resources (available money and infrastructure)
• community networks (our personal and organizational relationships)
• experiences (the stories of what has been done before)
Using these resources, we develop campaigns to win organizing, electoral, and public policy outcomes. But our campaigns need to be more than instrumental means to a victorious end. Movement building measures success by whether our campaigns and victories also create more organizing opportunities, reorganize existing power relationships, shift the narrative frame, develop new leaders, build stronger organizations, and expand our repertoire of contention.
Organizers are critical to making this change happen. Effective organizers have the ability to see and to experience the pain of a person and the world as it is, in all of its “grubby politics,” and at the same time imagine and ignite in others the imagination of what is possible and necessary. Walter Bruggemann calls this the “prophetic imagination;” Saul Alinsky calls it the “schizoid” nature of organizing. Ganz defines this complex relationship of leadership and organizing as “accepting responsibility to create conditions that enable others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.”
We come back to where we began: to a both/and rather than either/or approach. Seen through this lens, any particular aspect of organizing (whether it is building a collective story or mobilizing for action) or a given training (whether leadership development, campaign skills, or governing as a progressive-movement elected official) can be evaluated for the particular need it meets at a particular moment over the course of building a movement. Bronstein calls for mass mobilizing yet dismisses real organizing. She characterizes storytelling as therapeutic, rather than recognizing it is as the principal way we create a collective public narrative, imagine an alternative, build the power and motivation necessary to challenge existing power relationships, sustain our campaigns, and deliver progressive public policy at the end of the day. In short, she calls for a bolder, more expansive organizing at the same time she narrows its focus and drains it of its heart and soul.
Click to read "Zelda Bronstein Responds".
Erik Peterson is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at Wellstone Action and is an assistant professor in the Masters of Advocacy and Political Leadership program at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He has over thirty years of community, labor, and electoral organizing experience.
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