Marshall Ganz has spent a life in politics. An activist for more than 60 years, he has worked with the likes of Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with Cesar Chavez and United Farm Workers, and with Nancy Pelosi during her first Congressional run. More recently, Ganz has entered the academic world, teaching courses related to Public Narrative and leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Ganz is, perhaps, best known for masterminding Barack Obama’s grassroots strategy during his 2008 Presidential election run. Homerton Changemakers welcomed Ganz to Cambridge at the beginning of Easter term for two events exploring the message of his new book People, Power, Change.
Marshall Ganz leading a workshop on political organisation at Homerton College
Ganz’s book is a work of theory and practice. Simply put, the theory is that there is power in organisation: power when groups come together to deliberate and to act. The practice is set out over a series of chapters, which deal with subjects such as storytelling, relationship building, strategy development and cultivating leadership.
Ganz’s insights are political, but appropriate to Changemakers, much of what he advocates starts with education. In discussion with Homerton students, Ganz credited his mother, a high school teacher, with his understanding of education. Education, Ganz argues, is a process of drawing out potential, rather than making up for deficits. This understanding, informs Ganz’s view of leadership. He argues that leadership should be developed through relationship and through asking good questions. This approach encourages a potential leader to do their own thinking, reach their own conclusions, form their own judgements. Ganz discourages the practice of giving advice. Advice giving, he argues, is based on a model which assumes expertise and deficit: the expert is in a position to give advice because of their knowledge and experience, the person seeking advice needs help because they lack these qualities. A view of education based on potential rather than deficit emphasises human capacity, human worth and the importance of relationship. Crucially, these building blocks of education, are also the building blocks of a healthy politics. Ganz argues that education should recognise the dignity of human beings and flow from human relationships. In that sense, good education should embody democratic values and lead to a politics which recognises human agency, the need for collaboration and prioritises human flourishing.
Marshall Ganz in conversation with Dr Marta Magalhães Wallace
Throughout the conversation, I was struck by the similarities between Ganz’s approach to politics and the work of the celebrated Caribbean intellectual CLR James. Inspired by Marx and Hegel, James was a lifelong advocate of self-organisation. James’s great slogan was that all movement comes from self-movement. Put another way, James argued that people should work together to bring about change, rather than allowing other people to make change on their behalf. Consequently, James encouraged people to reason together, to talk and to write, and on this basis to act together to achieve liberation. James worked for Black liberation, in the Caribbean, in the United States and in Britain, as well as being a lifelong advocate of decolonisation in Africa and Asia. Perhaps the similarity of approach is rooted in a similar history. Both James and Ganz were active in the movement for Black liberation in the US, James in the 1930s, Ganz three decades later. What is more, both went on to spend a life time working for and theorising liberation.
Ganz’s message could not be more urgent. Democracy in Ganz’s home country of America, is under threat from corporate power, new and unregulated technology, racist populism, and a disregard to the rule of law. Faith in constitutions, however well written, ignores the fact that democracy is a practice, something that has to be remade in every generation. In a moment in which populism is on the march across America and Europe, Ganz’s reminder of the power of grassroots organisation is all the more important.
