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| Saul Alinsky |
Mark Engler and Paul Engler, TruthOut
Although Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern
community organizing in the United States, passed away in 1972, he is still
invoked by the right as a dangerous harbinger of looming insurrection. And
although his landmark book, Rules for Radicals, is now nearly 45 years old, the
principles that emerged from Alinsky's work have influenced every generation of
community organizers that has come since.
The most lasting of Alinsky's prescriptions are not his
well-known tactical guidelines — "ridicule is man's most potent
weapon" or "power is not only what you have, but what the enemy
thinks you have." Rather, they are embedded in a set of organizational
practices and predispositions, a defined approach to building power at the
level of local communities. Hang around social movements for a while and you
will no doubt be exposed to the laws of Chicago-style community organizing:
"Don't talk ideology, just issues. No electoral politics. Build
organizations, not movements... Focus on neighborhoods and on concrete,
winnable goals."
Veteran labor writer David Moberg recently offered this list
when reflecting on the work of National People's Action, or NPA, one of today's
leading coalitions of community-based groups. Given that NPA's dynamic
executive director, George Goehl, was trained by Shel Trapp — a prominent
Alinsky disciple — it is no surprise that traditional community organizing
principles are still reflected in the bottom-up, door-to-door methodologies of
NPA affiliates in 14 states.
At the same time, under Goehl's leadership, National
People's Action is also doing many things differently. His coalition is now
embracing a big-picture vision (talking about cooperative ownership of business
and public control of finance), and it is making forays into electoral politics
(forming a lobbying arm to do legislative advocacy and possibly even to run
candidates). In pushing beyond Alinsky's traditional rules, Goehl is motivated
not only to win concrete reforms within the existing political system but to develop,
Moberg writes, the "vision, strategy, and full arsenal of political
weapons needed to roll back decades of corporate conservative victories and to
create a more democratic economy and government."
Goehl's ambition is not unique. Other community organizers
who experienced the Occupy movement were impressed by the massive momentum for
change it created — even if much of its force proved fleeting. Efforts such as
the 99% Spring and Occupy Our Homes were steps by community-based groups toward
integrating their traditional organizing models with the social movement energy
that had blossomed in Zuccotti Park and beyond.
The desire to re-examine maxims such as "build
organizations, not movements" is an exciting development — one that opens
the door to interaction between those focused on building long-term
"people's organizations," as Alinsky called them, and those exploring
the dynamics of strategic nonviolence and disruptive mass mobilization.
It is also one that Alinsky himself may well have supported.
Looking back at the origins of many foundational principles
associated with the Alinskyite organizing tradition, it becomes clear that some
were not as deeply rooted in the founder's thinking as others — and that he
might have pressed for reconsideration of certain commandments that have grown
hallowed since the 1960s. These discrepancies raise an intriguing question: If
Alinsky were alive today, would he be breaking his own rules?
* * *
In recent years, Saul Alinsky has become known for of his
connections to prominent figures inside Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, Barack
Obama cut his political teeth as an organizer in an Alinskyite community
organization, an initiative on the South Side of Chicago known as the
Developing Communities Project. Hillary Clinton's undergraduate thesis at
Wellesley College was entitled, "There is Only the Fight: An Analysis of
the Alinsky Model." Because of these links, Glenn Beck featured Alinsky
prominently on his maps of leftist conspiracy in America, and Newt Gingrich
regularly used the organizer as a foil on the campaign trail in 2012.
There is some irony to these beltway associations, given
that Alinsky built his reputation as an anti-establishment radical working
squarely outside the domain of electoral politics. A Chicago native and son of
Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alinsky got his start organizing in the 1930s,
inspired by CIO and United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis. In spite of
mentoring from Lewis, Alinsky was convinced that the labor movement had grown
lethargic and that American democracy needed "people's organizations"
based outside the workplace — citizens' groups with roots in local communities.
In his first attempt to create such a group he founded the
Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council, an effort to organize the ethnically
diverse workers who lived behind the meatpacking plants featured in Upton
Sinclair's muckraking 1906 novel, The Jungle. To fight the slum conditions
facing this community, Alinsky packed the offices of bureaucrats with hundreds
of residents and routed marches past the homes of local officials. "Many
confrontations and several months later," author Mary Beth Rogers writes,
"Back of the Yards claimed credit for new police patrols, street repairs,
regular garbage collection, and lunch programs for 1,400 children."
By 1940, with the help of funding from wealthy liberal
Marshall Field III, Alinsky had created a nonprofit known as the Industrial
Areas Foundation, or IAF, tasked with spurring organization in other urban
neighborhoods. In the 1950s, Alinsky and Fred Ross worked through the
IAF-supported Community Service Organization to improve living conditions for
Mexican-Americans in California; there, Ross recruited a young organizer in San
Jose named Cesar Chavez and another in Fresno named Dolores Huerta. (Only after
years of training did Chavez and Huerta leave to form what would become the
United Farm Workers.)
Among Alinsky's other prominent campaigns, he would work in
the 1960s with black residents in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood to fight exploitative
landlords and to challenge school overcrowding, and he would help community
members in Rochester, N.Y., compel the Eastman Kodak Company to create a hiring
program for African-American workers.
Alinsky taught through stories, usually exaggerated, always
entertaining. In 1971 writer Nat Hentoff stated, "At 62, Saul is the
youngest man I've met in years." Playboy interviewer Eric Norden agreed.
"There is a tremendous vitality about Alinsky, a raw, combative
ebullience, and a consuming curiosity about everything and everyone around
him," Norden wrote. "Add to this a mordant wit, a monumental ego
coupled with an ability to laugh at himself and the world in general, and you
begin to get the measure of the man."
Alinsky's first book, Reveille for Radicals became a
bestseller when published in 1946; it blasted liberal-minded charity efforts
and called for an indigenous American radicalism based in citizen action. Rules
for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals came in 1971, near the
end of Alinsky's life, and remains popular. It was recently circulated by
Republican Dick Armey's organization FreedomWorks to Tea Party members curious
about the book's methods, even if they are opposed to its goals. Its first
chapter begins: "What follows is for those who want to change the world
from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by
Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written
for the Have-Nots on how to take it away."
Frank Bardacke, author of a sweeping history of the United
Farm Workers, recounts how Alinsky's principles for building power solidified
into an identifiable organizing tradition: "With Saul as the fountainhead,
community organizing has become a codified discipline, with core theoretical
propositions, recognized heresies, disciples, fallen neophytes, and
splits." He quotes Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy, an
Alinskyite training center for organizers, who calls Alinsky "our Sigmund Freud."
"What Booth means is that both Freud and Alinsky
founded schools of thought," Bardacke explains, "but there is
another, deeper link: the role of training and lineage. Just as psychoanalysts
trace their pedigree back to the grand master (they were either analyzed by
Freud or by someone who was analyzed by Freud, or by someone who was analyzed
by someone who...), so Alinskyite and neo-Alinskyite organizers trace their
training back to Alinsky himself."
Alinsky's influence today is felt not just in the IAF or
Goehl's NPA — whose member groups range from Community Voices Heard in New
York, to POWER in Los Angeles, to Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. It
is also present in networks such as PICO, DART, USAction/Citizen Action, the
Gamaliel Foundation, and the former branches of ACORN. Collectively these
organizations claim several million members, and the tradition has spread
internationally as well, with organizing trainings taking place in Europe,
South Africa and the Philippines. Each of the networks, writes sociologist
David Walls, is "indebted, in greater or lesser degree, to Alinsky and his
early organizing programs in Chicago through IAF."
* * *
The principle of "no electoral politics" took hold
in the Alinskyite tradition based on the idea that community organizations
should be pragmatic, nonpartisan, and ideologically diverse — that they should
put pressure on all politicians, not express loyalty to any. Historian Thomas
Sugrue writes that Alinsky "never had much patience for elected officials:
Change would not come from top-down leadership, but rather from pressure from
below. In his view, politicians took the path of least resistance."
Alinsky himself was not anti-state — as sociologist P. David Finks writes, for
him "the problem was not so much getting government off our backs as
getting it off its rear end" — but the focus of his efforts was outside
the electoral arena. The IAF's lingering pride in its "independent,
nonpartisan" status reflects its desire to recruit members from across the
political spectrum in any given community, not merely to engage the usual
suspects of progressive activism.
This "nonpartisan" avoidance of ideology also
relates to perhaps the most interesting precept in the Alinskyite tradition:
the one which distances community organizing from mass mobilizations. As
Rutgers sociology professor and former ACORN organizer Arlene Stein wrote in
1986, "community organizers today tend generally to shun the term
movement, preferring to see themselves engaged in building organization."
Why would someone promoting social change see themselves as
wary of movements? There are several reasons, and the way in which the terms
"movement" and "organization" are understood connect to
some defining aspects of the Alinskyite model.
Ed Chambers, Alinsky's successor as IAF director, expresses
an aversion to movements as a part of his long-term commitment to community
members. As he writes in his book Roots for Radicals, "We play to win.
That's one of the distinctive features of the IAF: We don't lead everyday,
ordinary people into public failures, and we're not building movements.
Movements go in and out of existence. As good as they are, you can't sustain
them. Everyday people need incremental success over months and sometimes
years."
Alinsky, too, saw a danger in expecting quick upheavals. He
argued, "Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and
dramatic change.... To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious,
but that's the way the game is played — if you want to play and not just yell,
'Kill the umpire.'" Before entering a neighborhood, Alinsky planned for a
sustained commitment. He would not hire an organizer unless he had raised
enough money to pay for two or more years of the staffer's salary.
Beyond setting expectations for timeframe, a dedication to
"organizations not movements" is reflected in several other
Alinskyite norms. These include the tradition's connection to churches and
other established institutions, its selection of bottom-up demands rather than
high-profile national issues, and its attitude toward volunteers and freelance
activists.
Alinsky believed in identifying local centers of power —
particularly churches — and using them as bases for community groups. The
modern IAF continues to follow this principle, serving as a model of
"faith-based" organizing.
Instead of picking a galvanizing, morally loaded, and
possibly divisive national issue to organize around — as would a mass movement
— Alinsky advocated action around narrow local demands. Mark Warren's Dry Bones
Rattling, a study of the IAF, explains: "As opposed to mobilizing around a
set or predetermined issues, the IAF brings residents together first to discuss
the needs of their community and to find a common ground for action."
Practicing what is sometimes called "stop sign organizing," those
working in this vein look for concrete, winnable projects — such as demanding
that city officials place a stop sign at a dangerous intersection. The idea is
that small victories build local capabilities, give participants a sense of
their power, and spur more ambitious action.
They also meet some of the immediate needs of the community
— far preferable, in Alinsky's view, to social movements' far-off calls for
freedom and justice. Throughout his career, Alinsky spoke the language of
self-interest. He looked to build democratic power among community members
seeking to improve the conditions of their own lives. He was suspicious of
volunteer activists who were motivated by abstract values or ideology, people
drawn to high-profile moral crusades. That movements were full of such people
did not sit well with the Alinskyites. As Chambers writes: "Activists and
movement types are mobilizers and entertainers, not democratic organizers.
Their script is their persona and their cause. They tend to be overinterested
in themselves. Their understanding of politicalness is superficial or
media-driven. They lack disinterestedness."
Moreover, Chambers contends, movement activists'
expectations for change are far too short-term: "Their time frame is
immediate. 'What do we want?' 'Freedom.' 'When do we want it?' 'Now!' 'No
justice, no peace,'" he explains dismissively. "Movement activists
appeal to youth, frustrated idealists, and cynical ideologues, ignoring the 80
percent of moderates who comprise the world as it is.... Organizing is
generational, not here today, gone tomorrow."
Chambers's view may seem harsh, but it is not atypical of
those drawn to community organizing. As Stein explains, "[T]he revival of
Alinsky-style organizations in the 1970s and 1980s often defined itself against
the social movements of the previous decade — especially the civil rights,
women's, and student antiwar movements — which it tended to view as promoting
collective identity formation over the achievement of strategic goals."
Patient base-building, long-term strategy, incremental local
wins. These ingredients would contribute to a lasting and influential
organizing model. They would also, in the turbulent 1960s, put Alinsky at the
center of an activist culture clash.
* * *
At the same time that Alinsky became a popular speaker on
1960s campuses, his vision of organizing put him at odds with many of the era's
leading activists — both its student militants and its more high-profile
leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1965 and 1966, tensions between
"organization" and "movement" surfaced when King and his
Southern Christian Leadership Council came to Chicago, Alinsky's home turf, to
mount their first Northern civil rights drive.
During the campaign, Nicholas von Hoffman, a close Alinsky
lieutenant, had a chance encounter with King in Memphis, Tenn., in the hospital
where activist James Meredith had been taken after being shot while marching in
support of black voter registration. Von Hoffman gave King his advice about
Chicago: "I told him I thought it could succeed if he was prepared for
trench warfare, which would demand tight, tough organization to take on the
Daley operation," von Hoffman writes. "I added it could not be done
in less than two years."
Von Hoffman was not convinced that King was listening. He
knew that the SCLC — coming off of mobilizations in Birmingham and Selma — had
grown accustomed to much shorter campaigns, sometimes lasting just months. Nor
was he impressed by King's decision to move his family into an apartment in one
of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods, which von Hoffman dismissed as a
"dramatic gesture" of little utility. "Organizing is akin to
stringing beads to make a necklace," von Hoffman argued. "It demands
patience, persistence, and some kind of design. King's campaign in Chicago was
short on beads and bereft of design."
Alinsky and von Hoffman regarded the SCLC leader as a
"one-trick pony" who relied too heavily on media-seeking marches, and
they held his team in low regard. As von Hoffman contended, King and the
outsiders he brought into Chicago "were, as far as I could tell, a
hodgepodge of young white idealists, college kids, and summer soldiers, most of
whom had no knowledge of the people they were supposed to recruit. In the South
the youthful white idealists were useful civil rights cannon fodder; in Chicago
they were dead weight."
Von Hoffman noted the contrast with his tradition. "It
was the antithesis of an Alinsky operation where outside volunteers were
generally shooed away not only because they got in the way but also because
they didn't have any skin in the game," he noted. "Laudable as it is
to volunteer to help other people wrestle with their problems, effective
organizations are built with people who have direct and personal interest in
their success."
This type of analysis reflected Alinsky's broader critique
of civil rights organizing. In a 1965 interview he argued, "The Achilles'
Heel of the civil rights movement is the fact that it has not developed into a stable,
disciplined, mass-based power organization." He believed the movement's
victories owed much to uncontrollable world-historical forces, to "the
incredibly stupid blunders of the status quo in the South and elsewhere,"
and to the contributions of church institutions.
He added, with King as his unnamed subject: "Periodic
mass euphoria around a charismatic leader is not an organization. It's just the
initial stage of agitation."
For Alinsky, stressing the importance of strong organization
was also a matter of bridging a generation gap. Those yelling "kill the
umpire," in his view, were the members of the New Left. Alinsky felt that
people his age were partially responsible for the youths' ignorance. In writing
Rules for Radicals, he sought to communicate with 1960s activists whom he saw
as suffering from a lack of mentoring — the result of a missing generation of
organizers. "Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the
1950s," Alinsky wrote, "and of those there were even fewer whose
understanding and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of
orthodox Marxism. My fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of
experience and insights to a new generation just were not there."
As a consequence, young leftists were too easily seduced by
quick fixes, Alinsky believed. In an afterward to a 1969 reissue of his first
book, Reveille for Radicals, he wrote, "The approach of so much of the
present generation is so fractured with 'confrontations' and crises as ends in
themselves that their activities are not actions but a discharge of energy
which, like a fireworks spectacle, briefly lights up the skies and then
vanishes into the void."
The creation of an alternative methodology — what Stein
describes as "a highly structured organizing model specifying step-by-step
guidelines for creating neighborhood organizations" — was an
understandable response, and one that has shown great strengths. But, in recent
decades, we may have seen its limitations as well.
The question is whether too close an adherence to a hardened
model has created missed opportunities — chances to integrate structure-based
organization and momentum-driven movements, and to harness the power of both.
* * *
It turns out that many of the rules of the Alinskyite
tradition come less from the founder himself and more from his successors'
subsequent codification of his ideas.
After Alinsky's death, IAF leaders Ed Chambers, Richard
Harmon, and Ernesto Cortes sat down to assess the factors that contributed to
the failure of earlier organizing drives. As author Mary Beth Rogers writes,
they identified several "patterns that created instability,
ineffectiveness, and eventual dissolution." Among them: "Movements
that depended on charismatic leaders fell apart in the absence of the
leader;" "organizations formed around a single issue died when the
issue lost its potency;" and "organizations that played to the public
spotlight confused their desire for media attention with their strategy for
change."
Clearly, the IAF heavyweights were critical of the social
movements of the New Left. But, more surprisingly, their assessment also
indicted Alinsky's own work.
While the founding father had planted seeds for
organizations throughout the country, only a handful survived for longer than
three years. As IAF organizer Michael Gecan writes in his book Going Public,
"Alinsky was extraordinarily effective as a tactician, writer, speaker and
gadfly. He was the first theorist and exponent of citizen organizing in urban
communities." But, "While Alinsky had many gifts and strengths... he
did not create organizations that endured."
This challenge would be left to his successors, in
particular Ed Chambers. "That was Chambers's critical contribution to the
world of citizens organizing and to America as a whole," Gecan writes.
"He had a talent for teaching people how to organize power that
lasted." Chambers' systemization of the Alinsky model would involve
formalizing processes for recruiting and grooming organizers, relying less on
large foundations for funding, improving working conditions to reduce burn-out,
and strengthening ties to faith-based groups. Other networks of community
organizations would further the model by bringing local groups into national
coalitions and creating their own training programs to refine and spread the
rules of grassroots power-building.
In many respects, these were necessary changes. Yet they may
have come at the cost of some of Alinsky's original creativity. In their focus
on building for the long term and creating strong organizational structures,
subsequent community organizing leaders have grown less sensitive than their
tradition's founder to the potential of exceptional moments of mass
mobilization.
In truth, Alinsky was far less rigid than the
"rules" attributed to him might suggest. Nicholas von Hoffman, in a
memoir about his time with Alinsky, describes his former mentor as "one of
the least dogmatic and most flexible of men. Alinsky believed that liberty was
to be redefined and rewon by every generation according to its circumstances
and the demands of the time." For his part, Alinsky liked to tell a story,
possibly apocryphal, of sitting in on a university exam designed for students
of community organization. "Three of the questions were on the philosophy
and motivations of Saul Alinsky," he claimed. "I answered two of them
incorrectly!"
This flexibility affected his view of elections. Alinsky's
biographer, Sanford Horwitt, notes that the organizer had plans to run a
candidate for Congress in a 1966 election on Chicago's South Side, and he sent
staffers from Woodlawn to serve on the campaign staff of an anti-machine
challenger. Horwitt quotes von Hoffman, who says, "A lot of people,
especially those who turned 'community organizing' into a kind of religion, now
take it as gospel from Saul Alinsky... that one never gets directly involved in
electoral politics. Well, he never thought that."
More importantly, Alinsky's take on mass mobilization was
not one-dimensional. One of the most interesting moments in his career came
when he attempted to integrate the energy of a social movement with the work of
one of his community organizations.
While organizing in the Woodlawn neighborhood in early 1961,
von Hoffman got a call from a civil rights activist taking part in the Freedom
Rides, a protest designed to challenge segregated interstate busing in the
South. The riders were violently attacked in Alabama — one of their buses was
burned in Anniston, and they were beaten by a mob in Montgomery. Having just
been released from a New Orleans hospital, the activist and some of his fellow
participants contacted von Hoffman to express interest in making their first
public appearance in Chicago.
Von Hoffman was initially hesitant — wary that the event
would not advance local organizing and mindful of previous civil rights rallies
in Chicago that drew only a handful of picketers. Yet he arranged for a talk to
be held in a large gymnasium in St. Cyril's Church. As Horwitt writes, "On
a Friday night, two hours before the program was to start, the gym was empty
and von Hoffman was nervous — his initial fears seemed about to be confirmed.
An hour later, an elderly couple arrived, and then, to von Hoffman's total
amazement, so many people turned up that there was no room left in the gym, in
the foyer, or on the stairs."
Von Hoffman arranged for loudspeakers to broadcast the talk
to the hundreds of people in the streets outside the venue. Later, he left the
event reeling. Far more people had come than his group could have possibility
mobilized through its organizational structures, and the issue had generated a
profound energy in the community. He woke up Alinsky with a middle-of-the-night
phone call and explained what happened. Von Hoffman said, "I think that we
should toss out everything we are doing organizationally and work on the
premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer
organizing but guiding a social movement."
To his surprise, Alinsky responded by saying, "You're
right. Get on it tomorrow."
The Woodlawn organization subsequently held its own version
of the Freedom Rides — a bus caravan to register black voters. The event,
Horwitt recounts, produced "the largest single voter-registration ever at
City Hall," startled the city's power-brokers, generated much greater
publicity than Woodlawn's typical actions, and set the stage for further civil
rights activism by the group. In criticizing Martin Luther King several years
later, Alinsky was not trying to write off the civil right movement as a whole.
A devotee of headline-grabbing direct action, he recognized its accomplishment.
And yet he sought to present its leaders with the challenge of
institutionalization — a question which King himself grappled with in his later
years and which is vital in thinking about how organizing models might be
integrated.
* * *
Alinsky understood something important when he embraced
"the moment of the whirlwind." He saw that using mass mobilization to
produce spikes in social unrest is a process that follows a different set of
rules than conventional organizing. Many of its principles — embracing demands
with wide symbolic resonance, channeling energy and participation from a
broader public, articulating self-interest in moral and visionary terms — are
the opposite of the principles that drive local community organizing. And yet
Alinsky was willing to experiment with their possibilities.
Former ACORN organizer Stein argues that such openness
became a rarity among Alinsky's disciples. The Alinskyite organizations of
recent decades, she writes, "often fail to grasp the possibilities of
mobilization when they occur." Because of this, they have unduly limited
themselves. "The great social movements of American history — labor,
populist, civil rights, women's (to name some of the most important
ones)," Stein argues, "captured the interest and imagination of vast
numbers of people by offering them material benefits as well as the experience
of communal solidarity in an individualistic American culture. In placing
'organization' ahead of 'movement,' ACORN and groups like it" miss this.
They discount modes of organizing that tap the transformative possibility of
going beyond the most local, concrete or winnable demands.
Whether it is the global justice protests of 1999 and 2000,
the massive immigrant rights marches of 2006, or the rapid spread of Occupy
Wall Street across the country in 2011, veteran organizers are often caught off
guard by movement outbreaks. As a result, they have few ideas for how to guide
and amplify these efforts — or how to harness the energy of peak moments in
order to propel their ongoing organizing.
Fortunately, in the wake of Occupy, an increasing number of
people are interested in precisely this challenge. Those now seeking ways to
combine structure- and momentum-based organizing models have much fertile
terrain to explore. This will mean opening dialogue between the worlds of
"resource mobilization" and "disruptive power"; and it will
involve allowing those immersed in labor and community organizing cultures to
compare their methods with the insights into mass mobilization that come out of
traditions of strategic nonviolence and civil resistance.
In pursuing this work, they can take inspiration from a
master of radical pragmatism. For while the split between organizations and
movements is real, the true spirit of Alinsky is in breaking the rule that
keeps them divided.
