Special Episode Part 1: James Mumm, Stephanie Luce, and Bill Fletcher on knowing your target, learning from successful failures, and building a united front

This episode is part one of a two-part special episode. You can listen in any order. Unlike our standard episodes where we zoom in on one particular campaign, we’re zooming out around broader strategy themes. To help us zoom out, we invited five insightful thought leaders, who each recently wrote vital resources for campaign organizers, to talk with Andrew. 

In part one, we talk with three guests. First James Mumm grounds us in ‘what is organizing’ anyway, the importance of thinking like a target in power analysis, and why campaigns must contest for mainstream values, pulling from his co-written report The Antidote To Authoritarianism. Then we hear from Stephanie Luce about her co-written book, Practical Radicals, how campaigns relate to her Seven Strategies framework, and learning from “successful failures.” Finally, Bill Fletcher differentiates between ‘campaigns’ and ‘movements’ and makes the case for broad united fronts, from his article in Convergence Magazine, “Campaigns and Movements: How Are They Connected, How Do They Differ?”

James Mumm is the Chief of Institutional Advancement at People's Action Institute. For the past 35 years, James has worked as an organizer with community organizations in Chicago and the Bronx, and nationally and internationally with Greenpeace USA, 22nd Century Initiative, National Training and Information Center, and National People's Action. James also writes book reviews for busy organizers.

Stephanie Luce is Professor of Labor Studies at the School of Labor and Urban Studies, and Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA in economics at the University of California, Davis and her PhD in sociology and her MA in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of several books on living wage campaigns and the labor movement. Her latest book, co-authored with Deepak Bhargava, is Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, and she cohosts a podcast with the same name.

Bill Fletcher Jr has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the author of several books about organized labor, a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator.

Transcript

Zein Nakhoda:  Hi, this is Zein Nakhoda from Training for Change, and we have a special two-part episode we're excited to share. Instead of zooming in on one particular campaign like we normally do, we're zooming out around broader strategy themes. 

Campaigns aren't waged in a vacuum. They're shaped by the political landscape. They work in tandem with other forms of organizing, and they're often part of long-term movement visions. So to help us zoom out at that level, we invited five inspiring thought leaders who have each recently written vital resources for campaign organizers to talk with Andrew. We recorded these interviews in 2024 before the US election, and we're releasing them now, several months into Trump's second presidency.

We are seeing attacks on trans people, on immigrant communities and working people broadly, and the dismantling of democratic institutions. And resistance is happening – from Tesla Take Down to ICE resistance, from public sector defense to solidarity with jailed Palestinian rights activists campaigns. Targeting pillars of autocratic power are an essential part of our way forward, and we think the insights from these next guests are as relevant as ever for organizers today. 

In part one of two, we talk with three guests. So first, James Mumm grounds us in “what is organizing anyway?”, the importance of thinking like a target in your power analysis, and why campaigns must contest for mainstream values, pulling from his co-written report, the Antidote to Authoritarianism. Then we hear from Stephanie Luce about her co-written book, Practical Radicals, about how campaigns relate to their seven strategies framework, and learning from what she calls “successful failures.” And finally, Bill Fletcher differentiates between campaigns and movements and makes the case for Broad United Fronts from his recent article in Convergence Magazine. 

We'll put full bios and links to all those resources in the show notes, so that you can check those out. Stay tuned for part two, and now let's dive in. 

Andrew Willis Garcés:  So James, if we watch the movie of your life, what's one key scene we'd see about you getting developed as an organizer or strategist or a snapshot from back then? 

James Mumm: Well there was a lot of those moments for me at Organization of the Northeast, which is now called One North Side and organizes on the North Lakefront of Chicago. That was the place where I really learned how to organize. And it was Sarah Jane Kanoy, the director and Josh Hoyt, the former director. Organizing to me, then, was learning each different step and how to build a leadership team. Or how to get people to move into action, how to do a direct action. So it's learning all the different components of what you do when you're organizing a campaign. A lot of those were one-on-ones and in private where I'm sitting there, struggling, talking to Sarah Jane, talking to Josh, talking to others. As an organizer at that time in my life in my 20s, I'm just struggling with the next thing. And once I learn it, then I got to go on to the next hard thing. 

But visually I was very lucky Sarah Jane gave me a lot of leeway to organize our housing and land use campaign. There was a Saturday morning, bright and sunny, and we had hundreds of people marching around Uptown in Chicago to make visible the gentrification that was happening. We went from building to building. It's not always easy to see that something has become unaffordable. So we started to march around. 

It was very different from other faith based or broad based organizations. We made some puppets, we had music, we had art, we marched from site to site. We had a wildly diverse group of people, and that was the kickoff of what became a quite successful campaign. But just seeing folks that are currently and formerly homeless, immigrants, faith leaders, all marching around and taking the risk to do so together in an action that they were probably not entirely comfortable with, was definitely a turning point for me as an organizer. It meant the leadership team believed in me, I believed in them, and the people followed them.

AWG: You recently co-wrote this report, The Antidote to Authoritarianism, How an Organizing Revival Can Build a Multiracial Pluralistic Democracy and an Inclusive Economy with Beth Jacob, through the People's Action Institute. Can you briefly describe the organizing revival you all envision in the piece, and what's especially important in this piece for organizers and base builders? 

James Mumm: We wrote that report after a lot of reflection by both People's Action Institute and its affiliates. Lots of other networks of organizations all across America, Center for Popular Democracy, Faith in Action, Gamaliel, Power Switch, and many more.

And we'd all been reflecting on the question of “how do we build more power - and power at the scale of the crises we're facing?” And the crises are intense, right? And they have been for hundreds of years for most Americans, right? Most of the people that live in this country have faced crisis. But we looked around and said, wait a minute, where are the adults? Who is solving the climate crisis or inequality or isolation or the threat of imminent global war? Where are the grownups stopping this? 

They're too tied up. The leadership of the party or other institutional leaders are too tied up with corporate power and other wealthy forces to get to the root causes of those crises. We looked around and said, organizing works. We know what organizing works on lots of levels. We know it can pass federal legislation. It can negotiate with presidents. It can change the law, it can change who governs. So why can't organizing be the core of the center of what Manuel Pastor and others at the U.S.C. Equity Institute called the “power flower?” Power based organizing is at the center, and you have all the other elements of progressive ecosystem on the outside - communications and narrative change and research, etcetera.

So we wanted to make a case that organizing workers and people in communities and wherever people are is the key to getting at the crises at their root. We wrote the paper, and it really grounds itself in relational power based community organizing. There is certainly a feeling that a lot of our movement has failed to build power at the scale that it could, or its lost some of the practices - the universals of organizing and we had to get back to some of those roots. Not back to some of the things that we luckily sloughed off, right? There were some things about organizing and from lots of different traditions that no longer served us. But there's a lot of it that really does work and we were calling ourselves - like an action on ourselves - to get back to the core of organizing.

AWG: Going a little deeper into that, why make an argument about what constitutes good organizing? This seems to go against the loose consensus on the left that any organizing is good organizing and is worth doing and sets us up to distinguish some of our friends and comrades and sometimes ourselves, speaking for me personally, as engaged in “bad” or ineffective organizing. 

James Mumm: Yeah, that's a great question. And yet we did say that. Not everything is organizing. I think it's a word like “power” and a few others that get thrown around so much movement. We need a movement. We need power. We need organizing. I feel like those are all words that unless you land on them, like they're like a quantum particle, right?

That could be here.They could be there, but until you define it, it doesn't have a fixed position. In the paper, we try to define power the way we understand as the ability to act and the ability to achieve purpose in the Kingian sense. We define “organizing” as relational work that brings people together and starts to build a conscious constituency of people invested in each other. I don't think that's the same way that everybody uses that. So we try to get really specific about these terms because if they're too loose, then we're not actually building power. 

For example: organizing to me is putting out flyers on my block that says we should really do something about the traffic stuff. Like, come on out. Well that might work, right? Some people might come out, we might get a few things done, but it's going to be the folks that are inclined to organize, and if I'm white, and the community is half white, I'm going to get white folks, you know?

That's like a form of activism to me. Organizing would be knocking on every door. Finding people who have some deep concerns about what's going on. The more interested they are - getting them to go door knocking too, and then teaching people how to door knock. And maybe the issue I thought was an issue is not really the issue that everybody wants to organize on.

What I'm saying is that I think organizing is a relational project. And when we use any intermediate things, pieces of paper, digital sources, I think it becomes something else. It doesn't mean it isn't valuable, like we need big mobilization too. We need activism too. But organizing means people getting together to solve things together. They could do it with lots of other folks all across the country, but I think it means people to people organizing.

AWG: One of the things that we think works are campaigns, and this podcast focuses on the particular craft of campaigning. Our episodes zoom in on specific campaign stories, reflecting on how groups cut their issues, choose their tactics, choose who they organize toward winning their demands. And zooming out, your piece identifies factors that undermine our power building efforts. You named a little of that just now and you write that a “lack of discipline and power analysis leads to transactional and short term campaigns that are not stepping stones to structural reforms and increased power and confusion about the value of strategic constituency development and scale.” 

So for organizers planning campaigns today, can you share more about those pitfalls and what the alternatives are? How should we use power analysis to cut campaign issues that build long term power building and engage the right, the correct, constituencies at scale?

James Mumm: Excellent campaigns cannot be done without really quality power analysis in advance, throughout, and non stop. And the case has been made recently in books, if folks are reading Practical 

Radicals by Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce make a terrific case. George Goehl just released a pamphlet called the Fundamentals of Community Organizing that says the same thing. There's a page on it - it's very short. It says if you don't do your power analysis well, in advance and during the campaign, you're not going to win that campaign. And that campaign's not going to build to the next one that hopefully wins something bigger. There's a case to be made.

You can use your different tools to do power analysis. You can make spreadsheets. You can have butcher paper up on the walls, but you have to answer a couple of key questions: Who is the target? Who can make the decisions that you want? What do they have power over? And those are good people to go talk to. Who has power over them? Well, let's go find out more about those people.

Then two questions I truly love. So these are best up on big sheets of paper up on the wall. What do they fear? And when you find out what someone really fears, it's something you ask yourself over and over again, then you want to figure out, how do I bring what they fear closer? So that's part of the strategy that comes through the power analysis. 

And then the other question is, what do they want? And of course, if you can really understand what a target wants, then your strategy is, well, how do I take what they want, and take it further away from them. That's how I think about power analysis, but there's great tools by Scope and Agenda and many others who have been studying the art and science of power analysis for years. 

In that story I told a little bit ago about in Chicago, we started running a campaign to win affordable housing set asides. Chicago at the time did not have any rules that when developers built buildings, they had to reserve some units to be affordable. Many of the cities have this in counties, but at the time Chicago did not. 

We labeled our campaign “the Balanced Development Campaign.” Anybody that was against it was against balance. For us, there was too much market rate development and not enough affordable development. In our power analysis, we looked around and there's lots of developers building at the time up on the North side. We looked around and there's all different kinds of big corporations, et cetera, but we found a democratic donor to the most progressive city council person, Helen Schiller, 46th ward. And we said, what if we run a campaign on him and we loop her into it and we triangulate on him.

We did just that. We made a public issue about the plan development. We worked with Helen behind the scenes. We demanded 20 percent set asides of affordable housing and she, back-door to the developer said, I think they'll settle for 10%, and we did. And so we triangulated on him, but we needed the city council person in the mix to help us lock down the demand. 

And in Chicago, developers need the permission of city council people in order to build their developments. So Helen had something over any developer in her area. And the campaign - I left the campaign at that point - it went on to great success and passed a citywide affordable requirements ordinance that's created a couple thousand affordable housing units in Chicago.

I'll give you one other example. And this was in the New York Times with the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. Folks are familiar with the Kingsbridge Armory - it's the largest armory in the country. It's 6 - to 700, 000 square feet. And for a couple of decades, the city government in New York has had terrible ideas of what to do with that space, while the community has terrific ideas: build schools, create small business incubators, create massive after school programs and childcare centers, all the things that the folks in the Bronx want up in the Northwest Bronx. 

Well, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition was getting the run around when I started working on the campaign with them - many years after the campaign started - we're getting bounced around like a ping pong ball. We'd go to the Bronx borough president, and he'd say, Oh, I'd really love to help you, but you actually have to go to the city. It's the city's economic development corporation that can give you what you want, (which was a Community Benefits Agreement, and a hand in the development.) 

So we'd go to the city's EDC, go down to city hall with a delegation of community leaders. We'd sit down with the EDC and they'd say, Oh, we'd really love to help you. But honestly, it's the political boss of the Bronx, then Jose Rivera, an assemblyman, who really calls the shots. So we go meet with Jose, take the delegation, go meet with Jose, sit down with Jose, and when Jose says, nah, you’ve gotta go back to the Bronx borough president. So this was what was happening. 

And so we sat down, redid our power analysis and said, wait a minute here. They're just playing us. Who actually has the power to make the decisions that we want? It was probably some combination of them. We had to get out of this triangle and bring one or more of those to our side.

What we did was build a new entity. We called it the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance. The organizers and the leaders recruited all the congregations, all the schools, all the small businesses around the armory. As a united force, we put some demands on both Jose Rivera and Ruben Diaz Jr, who was the president at the time and brought them on side to a proposal for a community process to decide what should be in the armory. 

Anyway, that's a long way of saying we had to get out of the ping pong and use our power analysis to figure out how to disrupt the power interests of our targets and reorganize the landscape so that we could move forward with redevelopment.

 After a long fight, the community did win a Community Benefits Agreement, passed by the city council, vetoed by Mayor Bloomberg, then overrode in the city council. The city's first binding community benefits agreement,it was a new process now, and the community took another big step forward: they put a bid in themselves. They got some equity partners. They organized the entire community and they're bidding on it. Anyway, that’s a different way of doing power analysis.

AWG: Also, in your piece, you raise that when, “Organizing narratives resonate with multiracial majorities, they can introduce new stories and actors into the public debate.” And you write, “Issue campaigns designed to resonate with majoritarian values such as fairness, freedom, and dignity are central to the bottom up multiracial organizing and relationships needed to disrupt the status quo.”

And this orientation shapes so much about how a campaign is waged, from how we frame our issues, who we villainize, what tactics we use, the tone of our actions, our visuals, and so on. And it can run counter to an orientation that says we should be more outspokenly radical and even be skeptical of mainstream values that are often employed by centrists and the right against us.

So can you share more about why it's important for our campaigns to “seize the imagination of majorities” and contend for mainstream values like fairness and freedom? What does it look like when it's done well and what's the impact on winning our campaigns building long term power?

James Mumm: Yeah, it's a great question. It took me a while to really understand this work. I think all of us as organizers, you know, we want a really different society. We want a really different economy, and we want to make strident demands for them. But we're not going to get there unless we organize majorities to vote, to govern, etc. That doesn't mean we have to settle for some middle mush. It means we have to move people over time, and we can talk more about that. 

Honestly, my best examples for this come from my personal experience. I live here in New Rochelle, New York. I work on school and library campaigns as a volunteer. It's a hobby. We have them every year and we have to build majorities to get people elected. And I really appreciate the work of a couple of different entities in helping me learn about this. One is Heal Together at Race Forward, just doing a fantastic job, they have a toolkit for narrative and organizing around school board races and organizing school communities and building majorities for strong public education and against, and a way to fight off the forces that try to divide school communities using CRT or anti-trans or anti-immigrant rhetoric.

So, I really appreciate what they're doing. They were influenced a lot by Anant Shankar Osorio and ASO Communications and We Make the Future and their terrific toolkits for narrative. We started employing some of those locally in these races. Every year there's a couple of opponents who are anti immigrant or anti trans or using CRT and things.

They're there to divide our side and build up theirs. So we adopted the frame. We believe in the freedom to learn, and it was transformative for the candidates and for our door knocking and outreach to voters. So when people had questions for us, like: should we really be serving everyone who lives here just because they, you know, moved here from another country? Do they still deserve to go to our schools? We say, well, we believe in the freedom to learn, don't you? We were able to have deeper conversations with people when we took the freedom frame away from the other side. 

And we gotta get smart. The Right has very successfully for decades chosen issues that they don't even care about the operators at the core, right? When, when same sex marriage was still an issue in America for 30 states, right? Constitutional amendments were passed. It was used to divide our side and build their coalition. We have to run campaigns to do the same thing. And so when we reclaim language that is majoritarian, and talk about it in the frame of strong public education, quality education for all students, equity and inclusion, I think we can win people over to our side. And pull people from their side, get defectors who may be confused about their values or what their values mean in society.

AWG: James Mumm, thank you so much for your time. 

James Mumm: Really appreciate it, Andrew. so much. so much.

AWG:  So Stephanie, if we watched the movie of your life, what's a key scene we'd see about you getting developed as an organizer or strategist, or a snapshot from when you were learning?

Stephanie Luce: I'd go back to my twenties when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, and I was helping to form an independent political party called Progressive Dane. It was part of Progressive Wisconsin. And I think at that time I had this notion of, fighting for this more pure electoral candidate and a more pure electoral party, and we just have to elect the right people. 

And we were pretty good at that. We did elect people and win city council, school board, county board. But I think the “aha moments" came for me when we were really working with our allies that we elected and seeing what they had to do to govern and the messy challenging work of governance. And the idea that just being elected isn't enough. It's then you're organizing inside that body and thinking about strategy, about building power outside of that body.  And that kind of led into some of my work around living wage campaigns and also seeing that passing a law wasn't the end of the story. It's really then just the beginning of the story of how you're using that to really build power.

I ended up working on quite a few living wage campaigns and then studying them and writing about them in my dissertation. So I actually studied the 80 to 100 living wage ordinances and learned that a

lot of them were never enforced. In fact, I'd call up some cities and the city administrators didn't even know about the laws. And so it was an example of: laws themselves can almost mean nothing if they're not enforced and put into place and they're not used to build capacity of the workers that they're meant to impact.

AWG: Speaking of lineages, this podcast comes out of a lineage that's actually about a way of making social change. It's not necessarily an ideological lineage, which is what you refer to in the book as sort of “issue based action campaigns” or “Issue based campaigning” and I'd love to dig deeper into the seven strategies you all offer and how they shed light on the diversity of those kinds of campaigns. To summarize, you argue that we need a mixture of creative strategies working in tandem. and the seven you name are 

1. base building both community and labor union
2. Disruption that interrupts the status quo. 
3. Momentum that leverages polarization and mass protest. 
4. Inside, outside organizing. 
5. Narrative shift to change the common sense. 
6. Collective care, including mutual aid. 
7. And last, electoral change through established channels.

And campaigns are mentioned across all these strategies. I might even say issue based action campaigns - sequences of collective actions that activate constituencies and pressure targets toward achievable demands - can be waged with any of these seven strategies, perhaps apart from purely electoral change, where it's just about one election cycle. 

So my question is, what are some examples of campaigns that employ different aspects of these strategies that you gravitate towards? What are their strategic choices? And how are they different from each other? 

Stephanie Luce: There's a lot of overlap, I think, from the way that your podcast talks about issue campaigns and the way we talk about strategy models in the book. In the book, we write about the campaigns to expand welfare access for Black and brown women. We talk about the campaign to win pandemic relief for excluded workers in New York state. The campaign to raise wages to $15 an hour. We use these campaigns to highlight what we call different strategy models, or lineages of change. What we're trying to emphasize here is the need to be serious about the source of power that we're starting with, because a lot of times, as I said, people adopted a strategy or tactic based on maybe thinking what worked in the past, but not really thinking about what we have access to.

I'm in the labor world. People often want to talk about strikes or general strikes, or sometimes we want to boycott a corporation. But we have to be realistic about: do we have that power already? Are we able to pull that off? Or in the electoral arena, we think about, you know, we want to change the system, so we're going to elect these people. But you know, what does it really entail to have the power to govern?

We argue that everyone has some access to power, but it might start with the very fundamental, the bare bones, basic powers of what we call solidarity power, the power of sticking together or the power 

of taking care of one another. The strategy models are about those campaigns - what source of power do they have to start with? And if it's not enough to win your demand, then how are you going to use those strategies to build other sources of power? 

So for example, we write about the Fight for $15 as an example of an inside/outside campaign that was able to raise wages in Chicago and many other cities and states. But they were not able to use that strategy of leveraging legislative power in the U.S. South in states where they have no political allies or very few. It's a strategy that can work where you've elected sympathetic or aligned legislators, but it's not a strategy that works in those places with no political power, and you have to think about another strategy model.

AWG: I think with that example, you all believe that it isn't about picking just one strategy and that campaigns don't always fall neatly into one of seven strategies, in fact, they may pivot from one to another. So I'm curious, for the organizers listening to this, who right now are doing campaign issue cuts, developing their own campaign strategies, what especially would you lift up as the usefulness of that seven strategies framework or how campaigners might use it to assist in their planning? 

Stephanie Luce: We talk about the idea that people should start with their base of power and then work from there to build, adopt other strategies. So for example, unions. We write about the St. Paul Federation of educators. They really wanted to win a strong contract, but they realized that their members were disengaged. The members really weren't even paying attention to the union at all. And they had to think about returning to the fundamentals, even though they had an existing union, they had to do that one-on-one organizing with other teachers and say, you know, what are the issues you care about? What's important to you? And it might not be the particular 5 percent wage increase or 3 percent wage increase. That might be important, but a lot of teachers cared also about their students’ learning conditions or the conditions of the community or school closures and things of that nature. 

So that's about building the internal base building as well as building solidarity power with students and parents. And beginning to build narrative power to really shift the narrative in the community about what schools are about. What's the purpose of a public school? Who is it serving? Is the teacher's union about the teachers alone or is it about building better schools in the community? That's a way of thinking about the teachers starting with base building power to move to narrative

power and then eventually build the power to strike or threaten to strike with disruptive power. 

We also write about the gay men's health crisis that started in the 80s of people who were at the beginning of the stages of the AIDS crisis, who had really no political power, no economic power, really no allies at all, and they had to start with the very basics of doing mutual aid and caring for one another just to stay alive.

And through that, building the networks and leadership and capacity to take on bigger fights and engage in things like disruptive action through Act Up or political pressure or other things. But they had to start with just the bare collective care, just to kind of take care of one another and build themselves as political agents to engage in bigger fights.

AWG: Alongside the book, you and Deepak wrote an extensive discussion guide full of reflection questions, tools, worksheets, links to other resources. We will link to this in the show notes. Hope everyone checks it out. And there's one tool I especially want to lift up with campaign organizers in mind. It's the one called Successful Failures. It's a framework for evaluating success that accounts for not just the “win” of the campaign demand, but also process and power building goals. And in the tool, there are four different outcomes, successful success, failed success, successful failure, and failed failure.

And I want to spend some time on this right now because this seems like one of the huge oversights when we look at all of the writing, recording, all of the published documenting that we do of Left movement. So little of it seems to be about reflecting on the different kinds of failures. Even just from some of the examples in your book, just thinking about how many of the foundational innovations of the Black freedom movement and advances would absolutely not have happened without like five previous failures for each one of those that has then informed sort of what we take for granted about Left movement building or campaigning. So if you could, I would love to have you define each of those and just say more about examples of each, but also why was it important for you all to include this and really innovate this typology of different kinds of failures? 

Stephanie Luce: I want to start by noting that I got the term successful failure from my Colleague Eve Weinbaum. I worked with her at the UMass Amherst Labor Center. We also were organizers in our faculty librarian union together for many years. She wrote a book called To Move a Mountain. She had been a union organizer in the South and seen a lot of plant closings and workers fighting to save their jobs when those plants closed. And in every case, she studied the workers did not win. They did not get their jobs back. But she came up with the concept of successful failure because in some of those campaigns, the workers did build capacity and leadership skills to go on to other fights, such as going to the Battle of Seattle and reshaping their notion about why the jobs were lost. 

In the failed failures, these were examples where workers didn't win their jobs back and they blamed workers in other countries, or other places, for why they lost their job, or they blamed themselves, or

they blamed their co-workers. I took that concept which I really learned a lot from and I do recommend that book a lot and thought about it in my own work in terms of living wage campaigns. Thinking about the 80 to 100 living wage campaigns that I studied, almost all of them won. A few of them lost and they lost, they were introduced, they didn't pass. They didn't build any organization. And that's what we call a failed failure.

But a few of them had really strong campaigns and Providence, Rhode Island was an example of this. They built an organization, a campaign for many years. They built leaders, they helped spawn other kinds of organizing, but they never passed the living wage. That was an example of a successful failure in that they didn't meet their goal of passing the living wage campaign, but they built leadership capacity and were able to go on to do other things. 

The other side of it are the successes. And here I saw a lot of living wage ordinances, as I mentioned, they were passed and then dropped. No one ever heard of them. Again, we don't even know if workers ever got the higher wage. Workers themselves didn't even know about the campaign. Often, these were the kinds of Campaigns that maybe were passed at the highest level, like a legislator came in or a mayor came in and said, this sounds like a good idea. I'll pass it. Or maybe a union president had lunch with people that he knew on the city council. They passed this law. The law is on the books, but it really had no impact. That's the failed success. 

And then the successful success is one that passes the law and builds the capacity. It builds a strong learning organization, such as happened in Los Angeles, where it built a whole movement that went on to pass things like paid sick leave ordinances. Other kinds of union organizing campaigns, where workers were aware of the campaign and engaged in it. Community allies were engaged in it. This was a successful success. These are just ways to think about how passing a law is one kind of campaign, but it's the organizing that goes into it and the organizing that goes into the implementation that matter just as much as whether that initiative actually, or that ordinance, actually gets on the books.

AWG: Thinking about our listeners of organizers crafting campaigns, what other lessons or tools from the book feel to you especially relevant or worth lifting up for those who might be listening? 

Stephanie Luce: Well, I think in this moment, everything feels so urgent. Like we have to act quickly because everything's in crisis and that's true. But I also think that we have to make the space for long term thinking. If we think back to other periods of crisis, like the 1970s, it always surprises me again to read some of the things that people in the chamber of commerce were writing. They felt in crisis, they felt under attack. People within the religious right. And they thought that they needed to make space to create institutions for the long term to invest in strategy. 

We just don't often make that space. Shell Oil, for example, has a department that does long term scenario planning and thinking about, how will we react with the next climate disaster? How will we react in the next war?

And you know, our organizations could really benefit from doing that as well, whether it's a day, a week, a few hours a month, whatever it might be-  setting aside the space to think long term. And also democratizing those skills, bringing more people into that space and investing in our own members and staff and leaders to be part of that strategy model. Our strategy will be stronger as a result of having a more diverse set of voices in there. And our movements will have more confidence about winning these long term fights. 

We talk about this idea we suggest of a strategy hub, which is not just investing in our strategy within a campaign or movement, but across movements, across sectors. Spaces where we can come together. The Right has created many of these strategy hubs and spaces where they come together on an annual basis, a monthly basis, in secret, in not-so-secret. We need to be fostering those environments where we're learning across traditions and seeing ourselves as part of developing strategy in a movement ecosystem.

And there's lots of great examples out there. This is not to say we don't have that. We have wonderful strategists in our movements, but I think many of them had to teach themselves. They had to learn on their own, or maybe they had a mentor, but we don't have enough collective spaces to do this, in a way that's expansive, and training at the scale that we need, which is thousands and thousands of people.

AWG: Awesome. Thank you for your time today. 

AWG:  Bill Fletcher. Thank you for joining us on the Craft of Campaigns podcast. 

Bill Fletcher: I'm really glad to be here. I've been looking forward to the discussion. 

AWG: Since you are a novelist, we thought we would start with the question: If you were the protagonist of a novel, what's a key scene or event we'd read about you getting formed as an organizer or a strategist?

Bill Fletcher: The key scene would be a 13 year old boy in his parents’ house reaching up to pull down a paperback version of the autobiography of Malcolm X and sitting down to read it and being mesmerized. That's critical to understanding who I am. I became an organizer through stages, first as a student organizer. I don't remember the exact moment, but it was sometime when I was in 10th grade, where people started looking to me for answers about struggle, about issues. They were pushing me towards playing more of an organizing and leading role as a student activist. 

Another scene would be right after the Kent State massacre in 1970 when I was in high school. I and another Black guy organized a meeting after school for people that wanted to respond to the massacre. We got an assortment of people and there was a group of white anarchists that were there.that were very disruptive. 

At a certain point, it was agreed that we would have a meeting that evening at 7:30 at the home of one of the anarchists. And so I came to the meeting and got there at 7:30, only to discover that the meeting had already started and that a number of plans were being put into place. I was never consulted and in fact ended up having no leading role in the protests. And that taught me several important lessons. One was to never believe when someone claims to be an anarchist that there is no leadership, because there always is. The question is whether it's open or not. And the second is never to cede leadership except when it's demanded of you democratically. 

And those were a few moments that were very important in shaping me and shaping my view of organizing and building struggle. 

AWG: Well, as you know we have a listenership of this podcast of campaign organizers and strategists. You've written a lot about Left strategy, Left analysis. We wanted to hone in on your article in Convergence, which is called Campaigns and Movements. How are they connected? How do they differ? that you co-wrote with Carl Davidson in 2023. Because we also hear talk about movement building and your article highlights the differences between movements and campaigns and how they're related. So for listeners who haven't yet read the article, which we will drop in the show notes, can you share an overview of the intervention you're making and what led you to write the article?

Bill Fletcher: Movements are the result of a variety of different factors that come together and essentially set off an explosion. The way I think about it, by metaphor, is when you think about a nuclear bomb going off, an atomic bomb in particular, it is the result of a certain amount of uranium that's being fired at each other at a certain speed, and that then sets off what's called critical mass that then results in an explosion. Well, the little packets of uranium by themselves will not explode. They will kill you as an individual if you're exposed to them, but that's not what causes the explosion.

It's the coming together at a certain speed, at a certain weight. And boom. And that's what we need to think about in terms of social movements, that social movements are not simply protests, or even waves of protests. It's something much deeper, more complicated, and, and so we end up using the term movements very loosely.

What Carl and I were getting at is that there are campaigns and there are tactics. Those campaigns may help to bring about a social movement. They may not or they may help to bring about an explosion. So in 2020, the response to the George Floyd murder was in a spontaneous eruption. To borrow from Gramsci even in spontaneous eruptions, there's organization and there's leaders. There were people around the country that responded and many people thought at the time we were on the verge of a new social movement. Well, unfortunately that doesn't seem to have been the case. 

It introduced some demands for change, but it wasn't long lasting. Carl and I were trying to get at, you don't just sort of build a movement out of your own willpower and wishes. We can contribute to the 

building of a movement through our work, and we can know that ultimately there will be movements. Ultimately, there will be social movements of people of color. Ultimately, there will be social movements of working people, etc. But we never quite know when that's going to happen or how it is actually going to come together. 

AWG: Well kind of, that brings up the subject of strategy thinking about, what moment are we in? What do we do? Where should we go? And across two seasons of this podcast, we featured campaigns which covers a range of organizational types from labor unions to national base building formations, to small activist cadres. Sometimes a group comes together to launch a campaign, but often an existing organization wages a campaign to further its goals and somewhat different than what you were just talking about when a movement sort of might launch from the conditions and might launch campaigns. But, you write here about how movements after an activating event, like that one tend to operate as a wave first flowing, then cresting, then ebbing with the threat of bureaucratization or cooptation, if gains can't be institutionalized, which you were just talking about.

So can you say more about the role of organization in campaigning? How do campaigning organizations help us get the most out of movement moments?

Bill Fletcher: If you look at the Montgomery bus boycott, there's so much you could learn from that, including that there was a core of people, the Montgomery Improvement Association, that had been working on this issue for quite some time, and had actually been trying to provoke a crisis, so that the demand around desegregation of public transportation could be dealt with.

They succeeded with Rosa Parks, and then they identified this relatively unknown minister to oversee this movement, Martin Luther King. And timing was really important. See, that's the other part of what happens with movements. Timing is everything. That the same incident, that is Rosa Parks being asked to sit at the back of the bus had happened once or twice before, and it had not sparked the kind of upsurge that we saw in 1955.

There's this issue of timing that we as activists have to always think about. It's sort of like what Lenny Bruce said about comedy. Comedy was tragedy plus timing, which I thought was a very profound

statement. And I think for us, successful campaigns are the result of good organizing plus timing. You can have very good organizing and the campaign goes nowhere. You can have good timing and everything flops because there's a lack of organization. But you put those together and boom. 

AWG: Well, just pulling back now to sort of where we are today in the broader sense do you have other wishes or encouragements for campaigners, as they take action towards their demands on what are probably uncertain or shifting ground?

Bill Fletcher We're going to, in this situation, need to be thinking about several things. One of the critical things is going to be the need for a broad united front against the MAGA forces. Now, I realize that when you talk about “broad", many leftists start itching, they start breaking out in hives. Because broad means that it can't be pure. So this cannot be pure. 

We're going to be needing to engage with people that we may certainly disagree with and may not like. But we will have a common opponent in MAGA because MAGA is not going anywhere anytime soon, until it is politically crushed. And when I say politically crushed, I mean that they will have to cease having the ability to exercise any power in this country. So we have to decisively defeat them. So that's one thing, the need for a broad united front. 

We're going to have to prepare self defense. And in a legal sense and extra-legal sense because we have to assume that a Trump victory and implementation of Project 2025 will mean that a lot of people are going to jail and others are going to be killed. 

So we have to be prepared to mobilize in the hundreds of thousands across this country. We have to emulate what I see going on in Britain in response to the fascists that took advantage of the horrible murder of those young women and then started creating a whole fury around alleged immigrant violence. 

But it was anti-fascists and anti-racists in Britain that have shown up in the thousands and have really blunted what we've been seeing. And so I think we're going to have to do that. We're going to have to make sure to preserve and build the united front. It's going to have to be very broad because particularly when in the context of repression, we're going to need all of the allies that we can get. Then you never forget our long term objectives, even if we're fighting in a defensive battle. 

And I'll say one last thing to your viewers or listeners. Defeat is not an option. It really isn't because the Right wing is making it clear as far as they're concerned, defeat means our annihilation. So this is, this is down to the wire folks.

Zein Nakhoda:  Zein here. Thanks for listening to part one of this special episode, and stay tuned for part two. We are linking to all our guests’ resources in the show notes, so definitely check those out. Also, we recommend checking out Stephanie Luce's Practical Radicals podcast, which is filled with a lot more insights and lessons. Links to that are also in the show notes.

AWG: The Craft of Campaigns podcast is a project of the Organizing Skills Institute, at Training for Change and made possible by grassroots donors. Visit Training for Change for workshops, training tools, and other resources.

We welcome your feedback and nominations for other campaigns that should be featured on this podcast. If you like these episodes, please consider donating to keep the show running. This podcast is produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier. I’m Andrew Willis Garcés. See you next time.