Finding the Pearl in the Storm
Finding the Pearl in the Storm was a pandemic project. I’d planned on having a long-term persuader gig, but it was Corona’d, and I had a month in an AirBnB cabin I couldn’t get a refund on. So I decided to clarify my thoughts on how these unions organizing campaigns I’d been around for so long actually worked. I had a lot of instincts and scattered bits of strategy, but I’d never tried to put it all together systematically.
I wanted to communicate what these wild campaigns are actually like in real human terms, and how to understand them on that level. What became clear to me was that these campaigns are in fact politics in the most real, visceral way, and at a scale which really resonated with me.
In college I focused on the worlds of Ancient Greece and Rome. There are first hand accounts of the politics of the era, written by the players, and we have many ancient historians whose work give a real flavor of the times. In the Athens of Pericles, there were something like 30,000 voters* divided into ten wards. Let’s assume that maybe ten percent of the voters are leaders in their communities and will sway the rest. That’s three thousand influential voters, divided into ten wards. These are numbers that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama would have been able to cope with instinctively. When my time machine arrives I’ll be hanging out a lot in the Agora, getting a hand on how the political hacks did their job. I’m guessing they weren’t much differnt from the political hacks I’ve met. People are people everywhere you go and everywhen you go.
Union organizing campaigns are like this. They are real, actual politics among voting citizens on issues that effect their lives far more directly than abstractions and slogans and walls and tariffs. You see formal ‘leaders’ who definitely are not leaders of any kind, and informal leaders that whole shifts would follow into a storm. You see what’s what among the voters, and more to the point for someone in my line of work, how the two organizations are behaving. It’s gratifyingly complex.
I’ve leaned on various Chinese strategists and their heavily Taoist-inflected way of seeing the world. It meshes with my experience, and the lifestyle of being a wandering Ronin of a campaigner. My work involves essentially air-dropping into a new organization with people and processes that are unknown to me in their specifics, just as the voters and the union are unknown to me. After a time, one sees patterns and dynamics repeated over and over until the whole thing seems like a Hindu myth involving reincarnation and Kali counting ballots for all eternity. Humans are humans, and we behave similarly in similar circumstances. If you can see what the patterns are, you’ll be well on the road to actual understanding of the complex and dynamic world of union organizing campaigns, where everything is always the same, and yet still nothing happens the same way twice.
I hope you like the book! I recorded the audiobook at the incomparable Voice Over Vermont studio.
*The actual number of inhabitants was perhaps ten times as high, but voting and thus full citizenship was limited to men meeting certain socioeconomic criteria. This sticks in the craw of the modern reader, and why shouldn’t it? When you study these things, you’ve got to reckon with the parts that stick in your craw. As it was taught to me, the history of western political philosophy is essentially the history of an expanding notion of what it takes to be counted as a full and noble human. Presently we’ve mostly landed on the notion that all it takes to be counted as a human is to be a human and that each one of us is as good as the next and should live by the same laws.