For his part, Alinsky, who died in 1972, 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. Among his targets were the Obamas of his day, from alderman to mayors to senators, for as he wrote in his 1971 bestseller, Rules for Radicals: No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough. Its easy to imagine Alinsky as an advocate for change we can believe in, directing the unemployed and the victims of mortgage foreclosures to put pressure on the erstwhile community organizer now in the White House.
Whatever his influence on Obama, Alinsky had a complicated relationship to the political left.
In the 1930s, Alinsky had little patience for the bona fide socialists and card-carrying Communists who were prominent advocates of labor and civil rights. He repudiated Marxism then. By the 1960s his moment of greatest influence Alinsky was even harsher in his criticism of the New Left. He viewed activists in Students for a Democratic Society as naive and impractical and denounced the tactics of their erstwhile comrades on the militant fringe, like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground as doomed to failure for their violent tactics and unwillingness to compromise.
Alinsky loathed dogmatism of all varieties.
But Alinsky also had little patience for mainstream liberals and European social democrats. He argued that the technocratic style of government by experts and bureaucrats was out of touch with the people. Before it became fashionable, he argued for citizen participation in politics and the devolution of power downward, away from Washington and into the hands of ordinary citizens. Though he was a secular Jew, Alinsky forged his
closest alliance with Catholic advocates of social justice, whose views at the time could not be described in the easy binary of left versus right. If any political view appealed to Alinsky, it was the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, namely leaving governance to the smallest possible unit: the community. Alinsky counted among his closest friends the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain (whose doctrine of personalism was one of the strongest influences on the young Polish cleric Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II).
Through it all, Alinsky called himself a radical. And he was. Alinsky drew from a deep current of indigenous radicalism in American politics, one that ran from
Tom Paine (who was Alinskys favorite founding father), through the incipient labor movement (early in his career, Alinsky worked with the Congress of Industrial Organizations), and the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.
In the truest sense of the term, Alinsky was a populist, who sided with those whom he called the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.
Alinskys small-d democracy shaped his strategy. He argued that leaders had to start by listening to ordinary people, not directing them from the top down. In Chicago, Alinsky launched organizing efforts among the ethnic workers in Chicagos meatpacking plants, whose plight had been made infamous by Upton Sinclairs Jungle. In the early 1960s, he launched a campaign to improve the quality of life for the black residents of Chicagos Woodlawn neighborhood whose housing stock had been gutted by absentee landlords and whose jobs had disappeared because of the corporate search for cheap labor and high profits. And just before his death, he called for a campaign to tap the disaffected lower middle class and turn their anger away from minorities and toward specific issues taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations.
Alinsky believed that the key to organizing success was citizen participation, letting the people set the agenda, not setting it for them. Alinskys goal was nothing short of unleashing the power of the people to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which men have the chance to live by the values that give meaning to life.
Facebook
Twitter