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Alinsky

Martin Jr.

Well-known member
Saul Alinsky - Secular Saint or Subversive Neo-Marxist?
Posted to Personal Update | Issue 120 | 29/08/2012

What have Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama got in common? Liberation? Revolution? Subversion? Corruption?

We needn’t spend much time on Karl Marx, the author of a revolutionary theory of politics, society and history. As he saw it, feudal society had already given way to bourgeois society which in turn would collapse and be replaced by a working class state, the forerunner of Utopia, the perfect society.

Antonio Gramsci was one of the founders of the Italian Communist party in 1921, a mere four years after Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and tried to export revolution across Europe. The Italian people showed little desire to imitate the Russian activists, for which Gramsci blamed three obstacles in their culture: the Catholic religion, love of country and personal altruism.

To overcome these three problems, Gramsci first attacked Christianity, arguing that it should not have any role in a country’s public life but be confined to a citizen’s private life. If that came about, he believed, it would cease to have any major influence. Secondly, he argued that Italians should see themselves as part of a great global mission to build a better world, and finally that the government, rather than private charities, was the best instrument to help the poor and vulnerable.

To his credit, Gramsci rejected state-directed terror as an instrument of revolution. He saw that Lenin and Stalin’s use of terror had failed to advance the revolution in Soviet Russia, and had only replaced one autocracy with another. Rejecting Lenin’s example of seizing power by force, Gramsci advocated attacking “the hegemony of culture” as the main obstacle to the Revolution. This would require the long, slow education of the masses, infiltration of the centres of learning and culture, and, for a time at least, participating in democratic government until a genuine consensus for radical social change should exist. Gramsci’s thinking underpinned the heterodox positions of Euro-Communism in the Seventies and Eighties, which earned him the condemnation of Communism’s hardline theoreticians.

One of Gramsci’s intellectual heirs was Alinsky who, while refusing to identify with any party or ideological movement, held many positions of the Italian thinker.

The Experience of the Great Depression

Saul David Alinsky was born in 1909 of Jewish-Russian immigrants in Chicago. His parents were deeply religious and few would have predicted that their young son would be a revolutionary. Yet, even as a teenager, he resented established authority: “I never thought of walking on the grass”, he recalled, “until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stamp all over it.”

Alinsky wanted to be an archaeologist and worked his way through university to obtain his degree, but, as he wryly remarked, “in 1929 archaeologists were in about as much demand as horses and buggies. All the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks.” So, instead of unearthing ancient cities, he began to study criminology.

The terrible conditions of the Great Depression not merely brought corporate America to its knees but left millions of workers and their families without work or homes, and surviving on handouts. It was a time of widespread social unrest and much questioning of the economic system that led to such misery. For a time Alinsky worked with the trade unions but decided that they were more interested in the betterment of their own members than dealing with the terrible conditions of the poor.

In the Thirties, he turned his attention to the notorious Back-of-the-Yards slum of Chicago, a by-product of bitter lockouts, unemployment and economic depression. Recruiting a small group of people who wanted to clean up the slum, he formed a Neigbourhood Council. Since the neighbourhood was 95 percent Catholic, Alinsky made sure that he established good relations with the local clergy. He began to develop methods to improve the lives of the dispirited, fractious and disenfrancised population in the crowded tenements. His first task was to persuade the ethnic groups—Irish, Serbs and Croats, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles and Lithuanians—to cease feuding with each other. Then, Alinsky concentrated on turning a “scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest”, and the people began to see the benefits of organisation. Bit by bit, the Council forced the local authorities and employers to address the problems of the area. These early successes in such an abandoned neighbourhood as Back-of-the-Yards was the birthplace of grassroots or community organising.

Now, with a basic model of how to restore a community in crisis, Alinsky set up the Industrial Areas Foundation (an institute which continues his work today) with the aim of training “indigenous” community organisers who in turn would establish community groups to take direct action.

How to be an Alinsky Organiser

So, how did Alinsky get to work? First, he identified a depressed neighbourhood with a large number of resentful and impoverished people; he discovered the problems and fears of people there, made them conscious of being victims of an unjust system, agitated them about their unaddressed and undeserved wrongs until they were eager to take action; finally, they went into action under his direction. The action may take the form of a picket, a demonstration or a street-theatre event; the more provocative it was, the better; start with minor objectives like street lighting or refuse collection, and then, with confidence gained, choose larger and tougher targets like a new school or proper housing.

From then on, community organising, as it came to be known, was to be Alinsky’s life work which would make him famous or infamous, according to one’s viewpoint. The Catholic archdiocese of Chicago and later the US bishops’ conference became major supporters of his work with personnel and finance.

Alinsky never allowed himself to be co-opted to any political party or ideology, still less to the work of the government. He was critical of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, describing it “a huge political pork barrel”, and was an early critic of big government, top-down social programmes which ignore local leadership and activists, and rely on throwing public money at social problems. He also fell out with many of the Sixties revolutionaries whose utopian schemes and penchant for unproductive violence and confrontation alienated the very people the rebels claimed to represent. Like Gramsci, Alinsky was convinced that the support of the masses was necessary for any successful revolution.

Two of Alinsky’s writings remain influential, Reveille for Radicals written in 1946 and the more philosophical, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, that appeared one year before his death in 1972. Addressing the Sixties generation, he wrote: “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.” The book contains impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one”.

He died from a sudden heart attack in 1972 in California.

A Pragmatic Credo and Agenda

Alinsky’s beliefs may be summed up as follows:
t He was a Neo-Marxist of a pragmatic type, and shared Marx’s view of religion as the “opium of the people”, even though he worked extensively with the Christian churches, and was funded by the bishops and the USCCB. According to his secular humanism, American society was deeply unjust and exploitative, and its unregulated capitalism was the primary cause of poverty and suffering.
t A political struggle between rich and poor, the Haves and Have-Nots, capitalism versus socialism, the people against the establishment is the only way to establish a just society.
t Ethical rules have no place in this struggle for social justice; truth and falsehood are relative to the time and place. The end justifies the means. If a tactic works, use it. Alinsky had only one test: does it work? Alinsky’s moral relativism, as his critics pointed out, is the reason why his imitators don’t have a problem about rigging the vote and justify such tactics as ridicule, lying, intimidation, threats of violence. For Alinsky’s critics, this was not political activism, it was urban terrorism.
t Consciousness raising techniques were one of his ways to attack the “hegemony of culture” that tolerated urban poverty, long-term unemployment, strike-breaking and the abuse of workers and their families. His methods would be copied by activists in nearly every victim group in the Sixties and after. Feminists, gays, blacks and illegal immigrants adopted his tactics with considerable effect. More recently, they have been adapted by the political parties to connect with large numbers of alienated citizens and increase their support in elections—no more successfully than by Barack Obama in 2008.
t Alinsky’s strategy was to challenge the ruling establishment, responsible, in his view, for the poverty and misery of the “have-nots”. This would be achieved by “baiting” the civil authorities with provocative public actions, hoping that they would react harshly by naming the “public enemy”, thereby giving the activists popular recognition. His unorthodox and often ruthless and outrageous tactics, shocked respectable society and deeply offended political leaders but made him feared by businessmen and officials and gained results for the inner-city poor of America.
t At the same time, there was more than one way to achieve revolution. Not all revolutionaries flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within. He understood revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties. Many leftists viewed Hillary Clinton as a sell-out because she claims to hold moderate views on some issues. However, Hillary was simply following Alinsky’s counsel to do and say whatever it takes to gain power.

Some Alinsky Quotations

In this book [Reveille for Radicals] we are concerned with how to create mass organisations to seize power and give it to the people.

A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganisation into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage—the political paradise of communism.

The People’s Organisation is a conflict group… dedicated to an eternal war… to wage war against poverty, misery, delinquency, disease, injustice, hopelessness, despair and unhappiness… War is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play...

A People’s Organisation lives in a world of hard reality. It lives in the midst of smashing forces, dashing struggles, sweeping cross-currents, ripping passions, conflict, confusion, seeming chaos, the hot and the cold, the squalor and the drama, which people prosaically refer to as life and students describe as ‘society’.

Only two kinds of people can afford the luxury of acting on principle, those with absolute power and those with none and no desire to get any... everyone else who wants to be effective in politics has to learn to be ‘unprincipled’ enough to compromise in order to see their principles succeed.

An organiser working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth—truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations...


Barack Obama the Community Organiser

In his early twenties, Barack Obama took an Alinsky training course, and worked as a community organiser in Chicago from 1985 to 1988. He was taken on as a community organiser and director of the Developing Communities Project, set up by eight Catholic parishes in Chicago. His first project was to retrain laid-off steelworkers. Little came of this project, but Obama continued to “organise” in the area. When his non-churchgoing became a problem, he joined the Trinity United Church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright until that gentleman’s anti-Americanism became a major embarrassment during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Obama’s area is known as Altgeld Gardens, a fancy name for a 1940 housing project in one of the least people-friendly parts of Chicago’s run-down South Side. The meeting place of his group was Our Lady of the Gardens Catholic parish. What did Obama achieve as a community organiser? Nothing very striking but, as his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, tells us, it was a valuable stepping stone to greater things. The local people remember two things about his three years there, the expansion of summer jobs for teenagers and an asbestos clean-up in the old public housing.

In both cases, the city bureaucrats initially refused to budge on requests, and the delighted Obama was able to train his volunteers in the well-tried public tactics to embarrass and force the hand of officialdom. They worked well enough and the local people were pleased, but it was not enough for the young Obama who after three years high-tailed it to Harvard Law School to discover real political power.

When he returned, he got elected to the state assembly, and then to the US Senate in Washington. And finally in 2008 he was elected President to become the most powerful organiser in the world. Whether Saul Alinsky would have approved of Obama’s ascent to power must remain moot. What is certain is that Obama’s debt to his mentor, something noted by Alinsky’s son, who wrote of the Democatic National Convention in 2008: “All the elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd’s chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people. The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organised event, Saul Alinsky style.”

Addendum 1: One example of Sixties radicals now working in the establishment is the husband and wife team, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, both founding members of the terrorist group, Weathermen, and participants in the 1969 “Days of Rage” in Chicago where a few hundred activists rioted and caused huge damage in the city centre as well as many police injuries. At the time Ayers was recorded exhorting his followers “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” Later the two were fugitives from justice for several years, and, when finally arrested and charged with violent crimes, were acquitted on a technicality. Today, they are leading and respected academics, he a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and she a director of the North Western University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center. Although the press refer to the two as “former terrorists”, neither has expressed any contrition for their past misdeeds. Ayers was quoted in a 2001 interview saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers and Dohrn are a well-known couple in the liberal-left Democrat establishment of Chicago, and live in the celebrated Hyde Park area, the home of many political figures. Not so many years ago, another resident of Hyde Park and a long-time associate of Ayers and Dohrn was one Barack Obama.

Addendum 2: While the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), part of the USCCB, has had a longtime role in supporting Alinsky projects, not so well known is the 30-year friendship of the renowned Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky, two people seemingly so very different in their beliefs and personalities. It was a friendship for which Maritain was accused of compromising his beliefs.

Maritain approved of community organising as an application of the Catholic teaching for the need of those “subsidiary, mediating structures” in society he had called for in his book, Integral Humanism. Alinsky’s project was, in Maritain’s view, a fitting remedy for one of the great scandals of the developed world.

Yet, it is incorrect to claim, as some Catholic writers have done, that Maritain had no serious reservations about Alinsky. His letters to Alinsky show that he clearly disagreed with Alinsky’s inherited Marxism that manifested itself in amoral relativism and a conviction of the total depravity of human nature. The Machiavellian model for action found in Rules for Radicals deeply offended Maritain, and suggested to him a loss of sound thinking in Alinsky’s later years when he wrote the book. For a more details, see: The Catholic Social Science Review 16 (2011): 229-240 http://cssronline.org/CSSR/Current/Articles%20-%20Wolfe.pdf

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