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Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer
An organizing manifesto for the twenty-first century, Playbook for Progressives is a must-have for the activist’s tool kit. This comprehensive guide articulates pragmatically what is required in the often mystifying and rarely explained on-the-ground practice of organizing. Here, Eric Mann distills lessons he learned from over forty years as an organizer, as well as from other organizers within the civil rights, labor, LGBT, economic justice, and environmental movements.
232 pages, Paperback
First published August 9, 2011
31 people are currently reading
338 people want to read
About the author
Eric Mann
34 books3 followersEric Mann is director of the Los Angeles–based Labor/Community Strategy Center and cofounder of the Bus Riders Union. He is the author of six books and has worked extensively with many organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, and the United Auto Workers. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 2, 2019
Eric Mann has long been involved with Los Angeles' Strategy Center -- which spawned the Bus Riders Union -- and a mentor of Patrisse Cullors (Black Lives Matter, Dignity and Power Now, Justice LA). This background led me to pick up this book. It has two parts: 12 roles of the successful organizer and 16 qualities of the successful organizer. In each relatively short chapter, Mann relates the story of a specific organizing campaign or the contributions of a specific organizer. Most of the case studies center on workers, but a few deal with, say, Native sovereignty, DREAMers, or, of course, LA bus riders.
Mann is a white male Boomer and the book is from 2011, so, as other reviewers have pointed out, this book isn't for everyone. For instance, he features a lot of women of color, but he doesn't really get into how the risks they took were different from the ones he took, how male organizers need to fight the tendency of emotional labor in organizing to be super gendered, etc. And this isn't your go-to book for any transformations of the 2010s, i.e., anything driven by smartphones. But the core lessons stand. I think this book would be useful to anyone who has heard the term "organizing" but isn't sure how that differs from activism in general, who wants to expand their activism but isn't sure what steps to take or where they best fit in. I also think this could be useful for organizers who are seasoned but haven't had any structured training or learned much about organizing history in the US. It offers good frameworks for reflecting on and setting intentions and roles, strategizing as a group, and recognizing and mentoring new members.
Mann is a white male Boomer and the book is from 2011, so, as other reviewers have pointed out, this book isn't for everyone. For instance, he features a lot of women of color, but he doesn't really get into how the risks they took were different from the ones he took, how male organizers need to fight the tendency of emotional labor in organizing to be super gendered, etc. And this isn't your go-to book for any transformations of the 2010s, i.e., anything driven by smartphones. But the core lessons stand. I think this book would be useful to anyone who has heard the term "organizing" but isn't sure how that differs from activism in general, who wants to expand their activism but isn't sure what steps to take or where they best fit in. I also think this could be useful for organizers who are seasoned but haven't had any structured training or learned much about organizing history in the US. It offers good frameworks for reflecting on and setting intentions and roles, strategizing as a group, and recognizing and mentoring new members.
April 27, 2012
Eric Mann has been an organizer since the 1960's. I read about him back in my Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) days. He's been a community organizer and labor organizer and was one of the founders of the LA Bus Riders Union. He draws upon his deep and wide experience and the many human contacts he has made over the years to give us a point by point guide to successfully Fight the Power.
Mann knows we are in a marathon, not a sprint and that it may take generations to achieve our deeper and more far reaching objectives. He understands the importance of having a moral vision as well as practical day to day street smarts. If you want to change USA society for the better, read this book.
Mann knows we are in a marathon, not a sprint and that it may take generations to achieve our deeper and more far reaching objectives. He understands the importance of having a moral vision as well as practical day to day street smarts. If you want to change USA society for the better, read this book.
September 7, 2020
"A Book of Nuts & Bolts for Your Breakfast of Nuts & Bolts"
Eric Mann's "Playbook for Progressives" (2011) might seem quite dated, given that it was published months before the great left reawakening after Occupy Wall Street, BLM and Bernie Sanders Five-Year Campaign for President, but the author really shines when he provides small poignant vignettes of what organizers do, and how they really are quite different than the sometimes-there activists, who buzz in-and-out for food samples, but aren't really keeping the kitchen functioning 24/7. The book's core strengths are to be found in those vignettes of the huge sacrifices organizers make for their community that largely go unnoticed from all who benefit from them, and it reminds us that anything good and humane in this world came from the thousands of invisible organizers who reimagined what our world could be. Those personal portraits--either from first-hand accounts or historical examples--emotionalize and allow glimmers of storytelling to peak through. I couldn't help wish those vignettes were fully fleshed out stories, which would have deepened the emotional heft and richness of the book, but I also see how this is a handbook and not a work of anthropology or biography.
"Playbook for Progressives" is designed in two halves: Part I being about the twelve "roles" or "jobs" that a successful organizer must play (such as a recruiter, evangelist, the fund-raiser); Part 2 is about the 16 "qualities" that make for a successful organizer (such as good listener, generosity of spirit, strong work ethic and so on). There is a good deal of overlap in how many of the qualities intersect with the jobs an organizer must perform, but this book is very, very praxis-based, and I couldn't help wish that there was a much deeper engagement with theories of change and theories of power (as seen in much better ways with Jonathan Smucker's "Hegemony How-To"). Eric Mann is by no means a stylist of the language and a lot of his language is flat, direct and leans into cliched language; but the benefit of his ho-hum sentence textures is that this book is easily accessible to read for people not interested in getting a Ph.D. in Literature or Philosophy. "Playbook for Progressives" is clearly a work by an organizer hoping to give the "nuts & bolts" of organizing to other organizers--or soon-to-be organizers. As such, the chapters are immensely short, rarely going beyond four pages. While many other reviewers have cited his central "whiteness" as a problem, I found his inability to connect his Jewishness to the Civil Rights Movement to be strangely absent, especially since Eric Mann's first heave-ho into organizing came with his joining up with CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) after hearing an impassioned speech from a Black Civil Rights organizer with SNCC. Being or passing as white is certainly a benefit to Jewish folks in America, but as we've seen with Nazi flags at Sanders rallies in 2020, assimilation into "whiteness" is not permanent and can just as easily move back into marginalized otherness and racial terror. Still, on the other extreme end, Mann doesn't endlessly navel-gaze about himself as other "white" authors are subject to do in books about activism or organizing, and he spends the majority of his book talking about folks of color and/or women who are doing the frontline organizing work who rarely make headlines, but deserve our love and plaudits. Once read, you might come away with a sense of doomed impossibility because these 12 jobs and 16 qualities mean you "can't be" an organizer unless you meet these benchmarks, but Mann quietly reminds readers that we are all striving as organizers to become better organizers, and he shows examples of people who initially failed (including the author) to learn better and win more a second time while cooking in the kitchen for social transformation. What I gathered on my own as an organizers is that these 16 qualities and 12 jobs actually arise--not from one person--but from your organization as a whole, and that the stronger the organization, the less you will need the organizer to "meet" these qualities.
Interestingly enough, I found the most amazing and enchanting components to the book were the sections--intermittently between chapters--about LA's Bus Riders Union (BRU) of which the author is the co-founder and director of; these passages show a story that are immense in effect and power--and having lived in SoCal for 20 years--I was gobsmacked that their organizing and activism in LA has never made it to wider awareness either in feature articles or documentaries. While Eric Mann is no Rosa Luxembourg in terms of writing and theory, he is certainly a good modern example of Eugene Debs: a communicator and organizer of great praxis.
-{POUND-COUNT: 78/100}-
Eric Mann's "Playbook for Progressives" (2011) might seem quite dated, given that it was published months before the great left reawakening after Occupy Wall Street, BLM and Bernie Sanders Five-Year Campaign for President, but the author really shines when he provides small poignant vignettes of what organizers do, and how they really are quite different than the sometimes-there activists, who buzz in-and-out for food samples, but aren't really keeping the kitchen functioning 24/7. The book's core strengths are to be found in those vignettes of the huge sacrifices organizers make for their community that largely go unnoticed from all who benefit from them, and it reminds us that anything good and humane in this world came from the thousands of invisible organizers who reimagined what our world could be. Those personal portraits--either from first-hand accounts or historical examples--emotionalize and allow glimmers of storytelling to peak through. I couldn't help wish those vignettes were fully fleshed out stories, which would have deepened the emotional heft and richness of the book, but I also see how this is a handbook and not a work of anthropology or biography.
"Playbook for Progressives" is designed in two halves: Part I being about the twelve "roles" or "jobs" that a successful organizer must play (such as a recruiter, evangelist, the fund-raiser); Part 2 is about the 16 "qualities" that make for a successful organizer (such as good listener, generosity of spirit, strong work ethic and so on). There is a good deal of overlap in how many of the qualities intersect with the jobs an organizer must perform, but this book is very, very praxis-based, and I couldn't help wish that there was a much deeper engagement with theories of change and theories of power (as seen in much better ways with Jonathan Smucker's "Hegemony How-To"). Eric Mann is by no means a stylist of the language and a lot of his language is flat, direct and leans into cliched language; but the benefit of his ho-hum sentence textures is that this book is easily accessible to read for people not interested in getting a Ph.D. in Literature or Philosophy. "Playbook for Progressives" is clearly a work by an organizer hoping to give the "nuts & bolts" of organizing to other organizers--or soon-to-be organizers. As such, the chapters are immensely short, rarely going beyond four pages. While many other reviewers have cited his central "whiteness" as a problem, I found his inability to connect his Jewishness to the Civil Rights Movement to be strangely absent, especially since Eric Mann's first heave-ho into organizing came with his joining up with CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) after hearing an impassioned speech from a Black Civil Rights organizer with SNCC. Being or passing as white is certainly a benefit to Jewish folks in America, but as we've seen with Nazi flags at Sanders rallies in 2020, assimilation into "whiteness" is not permanent and can just as easily move back into marginalized otherness and racial terror. Still, on the other extreme end, Mann doesn't endlessly navel-gaze about himself as other "white" authors are subject to do in books about activism or organizing, and he spends the majority of his book talking about folks of color and/or women who are doing the frontline organizing work who rarely make headlines, but deserve our love and plaudits. Once read, you might come away with a sense of doomed impossibility because these 12 jobs and 16 qualities mean you "can't be" an organizer unless you meet these benchmarks, but Mann quietly reminds readers that we are all striving as organizers to become better organizers, and he shows examples of people who initially failed (including the author) to learn better and win more a second time while cooking in the kitchen for social transformation. What I gathered on my own as an organizers is that these 16 qualities and 12 jobs actually arise--not from one person--but from your organization as a whole, and that the stronger the organization, the less you will need the organizer to "meet" these qualities.
Interestingly enough, I found the most amazing and enchanting components to the book were the sections--intermittently between chapters--about LA's Bus Riders Union (BRU) of which the author is the co-founder and director of; these passages show a story that are immense in effect and power--and having lived in SoCal for 20 years--I was gobsmacked that their organizing and activism in LA has never made it to wider awareness either in feature articles or documentaries. While Eric Mann is no Rosa Luxembourg in terms of writing and theory, he is certainly a good modern example of Eugene Debs: a communicator and organizer of great praxis.
-{POUND-COUNT: 78/100}-
June 8, 2018
This book provides some good ideas for folks looking to improve their community organizing skills and I appreciate how he names names of so many of the folks he's worked with throughout many years and settings. I do wish the author intentionally brought his identities into the book - I think that would help him write in ways that are more open, accessible, and encouraging especially to those of us who aren't white men.
November 24, 2024
An excellent primer for those interested in joining organizing efforts or who are already involved in the struggle.
March 17, 2017
Great frameworks for any kind of community leader, not just political leaders.
The table of contents is the most useful portion. I ended up reading just the first few paragraphs of each chapter because the rest of the chapters were examples that were quite superfluous.
The table of contents is the most useful portion. I ended up reading just the first few paragraphs of each chapter because the rest of the chapters were examples that were quite superfluous.
December 19, 2011
Many of us pass through (not just once) a point in our political lives where we see the difference between organizer, activist, and other terms for our engagement, as forks in the road. For those in this process, Eric Mann offers his perspective and arguments for becoming "transformative organizers." He draws on his experience to give a framework for thinking about the organizer's roles and qualities. Most valuably, he provides vignettes and profiles of organizers he's learned from and who demonstrate his points of what makes a transformative organizer.
Someone at the right time could be deeply inspired by this book. For most, it will offer scattered bits of inspiration or chances to reflect on our political engagement. This book should be keep at hand, a resource for the many forks in the road we'll find and for the reflection required by the challenges of our work.
Someone at the right time could be deeply inspired by this book. For most, it will offer scattered bits of inspiration or chances to reflect on our political engagement. This book should be keep at hand, a resource for the many forks in the road we'll find and for the reflection required by the challenges of our work.
November 5, 2011
Frank, practical training guide for going from issue activism and engagement to becoming a committed grass roots, social change organizer. Based on Eric Mann's years of commitment to and experience with radical organizing in Los Angeles. Reading it alone, you gain some perspectives. To really use it, I suspect you would need to go through a training program with him.
December 1, 2011
This is an excellent and comprehensive field guide on the principles and practices of transformative organizing. There are decades of local, regional, national, and international movement building experience distilled in its pages. A must read for anyone wanting to make systemic change.
February 8, 2012
This book was great. A lot of real examples that you can relate to. It moved fast and has lots of great lessons for people considering organizing. I felt like the word 'revolution' was used a bit broadly for my taste. Read it.
December 20, 2011
Got energized by Occupy? Want to stay in for the long-haul? Read this book. Nuff said.
November 4, 2012
Nothing fancy, just a good breakdown of the qualities and roles of good organizers, with some nice examples.
November 21, 2014
Very helpful for current organizers or would be organizers. Very helpful for people working in organizations and managing volunteers.
For me, right now, not so helpful.
For me, right now, not so helpful.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews