Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (review)

For those who wish not only to understand the world, but to change it, the key question about social movements of the oppressed is why they (sometimes) succeed, and what can be done to make future movements more likely to succeed. This is not the question at the center of most academic social movement literature, but it is the focus of Marshall Ganz's analysis of the 1960s' California farm worker movement, their battles with growers and Teamsters, their strikes and boycotts.

The other prominent book that poses the question of why movements succeed is Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward's Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (Vintage 1979); interestingly, both Ganz and Piven-Cloward were activists in the movements they studied. Evidently significant involvement in a movement shapes what social scientists see as the most important, and most interesting, question. Ganz's answer is in some sense diametrically opposed to that of Piven and Cloward. Piven and Cloward argued "that efforts to build organizations are futile;"(xxi) in opposition to this, Ganz writes that "the UFW succeeded, while the rival AFL-CIO and Teamsters failed, because the UFW's leadership devised more effective strategy, in fact a stream of effective strategy."(8)

Ganz seeks to show not simply that the UFW leadership devised more effective strategy, but also why it was able to do so. His answer, presented as a general theoretical argument in the introduction, and consistently developed through a fascinating and compelling case study, focuses on the social structure of leadership and strategy. Certain social structural conditions make it much more likely that a movement will develop effective strategy; understanding those conditions can guide future movements.

One crucial element of success is relying on a leadership team, whose deliberations are open for discussion and disagreement, such that learning takes place in the course of the exchanges. The contrast is with a hierarchical or centralized operation where no one has the room to disagree with the leader.

A second strength is a team that includes and fully incorporates people with a range of different perspectives and structural circumstances, which leads to informed consideration of the full range of options and sensible evaluation of the effects on, and responses from, varying constituencies.

Third is the level of motivation and commitment by those involved, not simply in terms of self-expressed motivation, and not even in levels of time and sacrifice (although that is important), but also in the sense of having no option but to go forward. Spanish conquistador Cortes burned his boats so his army would have no possibility of retreat; Ganz argues that social movement leaders in similar circumstances are more likely to find creative strategies for success.

Finally, and in some sense the underpinning to all the other factors, movements succeed if they incorporate and rely on those they are trying to organize, not simply as bodies to show up at demonstrations, but as the source of whatever funds and resources will be used. The AFL-CIO lost, at least in part, because it received ample resources from central headquarters, and thus was answerable to George Meany in Washington, D.C. Chavez and the farm workers won, at least in part, because they lived on the same strike pay as the workers, and depended on the meager contributions that farm workers could provide. Aldon Morris makes a similar point in The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (Free Press 1984): ordinary blacks, not foundations, funded the early movement.

Why David Sometimes Wins asks a specific question: why did this group succeed, and not another? It makes no sustained effort to explain why farm worker organizing succeeded in the 1960s and not in the 1930s, or why farm workers are far less unionized than auto workers, or any of a range of similar questions that could be asked.

For an observer of today's...