Saul Alinsky-his philosophy

http://www.progress.org/archive/alinsky.htm

Champion of the Nonsocialist Left

SAUL ALINSKY AND THE INDUSTRIAL AREASFOUNDATION

(Publisher's note -- this article is reprinted here with the permission of the author.Saul Alinsky, like Henry George, Thomas PaineandDorothy Day, was a world-class leader of the nonsocialist left. Find out more!)

SAUL ALINSKY AND THE INDUSTRIAL AREAS FOUNDATIONBUILDING STRONG CITIZENS ORGANIZATIONS FOR POWER -- ACTION -- JUSTICE.

Alinsky: More Important Now Than Ever

By Sanford D. HorwittA good many years ago on this day [June 12th], the pioneering Chicago communityorganizer Saul Alinsky died. But, like one of his heroes, Tom Paine, who also believed inthe radical American idea that democracy is for ordinary people, Alinsky's spirit and

importance live on. For me, that's no small comfort amidst the decay of democracy wherevoters are vanishing, the special interest money pours in and the president's bridge to the21st Century leads to the end of the inheritance tax as we know it.In recent years, there has been a flood of books lamenting our skewed politics and frayedcivil society. When I pick one up, I flip to the index to see if "Alinsky" appears. In the best of the lot, he does. Alinsky is "an important model for contemporary citizen politics," William Greider wrote five years ago in Who Will Tell the People?, his best-selling and gloomy account of "the betrayal of American democracy." And three yearsago in Michael Sandel's thoughtful Democracy's Discontent, he cited Alinsky and hissuccessors at the Industrial Areas Foundation (I.A.F.) as representing "one of the most promising expressions" of civic participation and noted that, through a national network of community-based organizations, Alinsky's direct descendants are "teach[ing] residentsof poor communities how to engage in effective political activity."The scale of the I.A.F.'s work today--there are some 50 church-based, interfaith andinterracial organizations stretching from East Brooklyn to the East Side of Los Angeles--is steadily approaching Alinsky's unfulfilled dream of a large network of "Peoples'Organizations" that would provide tens-of-thousands of ordinary working and modest-income Americans with a measure of power to shape decisions that affect their lives andcommunities.In the 1940s, Alinsky organized the basic model in "the Jungle," the old Chicagostockyards neighborhood made famous in Upton Sinclair's classic muckraking work.There, he recruited and guided indigenous leaders who identified common interests that brought together previously hostile ethnic groups of Serbs and Croatians, Czechs andSlovaks, Poles and Lithuanians into a large organization, the Back of The Yards Neighborhood Council.The Council, like the handful of other large-scale organizations Alinsky organized in predominantly black communities in the late 50s and 60s, was in part a pressure group,demanding and negotiating with public and private sector institutions on bread and butter issues like better schools and more jobs, and in part a self-help operation that establishedcredit unions, built or rehabbed housing and provided social services.As important as these functions were, the greater significance of Alinsky's voluntarycommunity organizations is that they provided a connection between the individual andthe larger society. This was what made Alinsky's experiment important, Daniel Bell wrotein 1945, in his review of Alinsky's book, Reveille for Radicals, because it "attempts togive people a sense of participation and belonging [and] becomes important as a weaponagainst cynicism and despair . . . ."A real democracy cannot long endure when half of the people no longer vote and in mostevery other way have dropped out of the democratic process. But when the oppositeoccurs, one is afforded a glimpse of the wonderful possibilities of citizenship throughcollective action. Such was the case in May 1997 at a church meeting in Baltimore where

Maryland governor Parris N. Glendening announced that he would issue an executiveorder barring employers from hiring taxpayer-subsidized welfare recipients to replaceworkers already on the job, making Maryland the first state to take such action on thecontroversial "worker displacement" issue.Glendening, facing a tough re-election challenge, made his announcement at a churchfilled with 300 black, white and Hispanic representatives of the I.A.F.'s three, largeMaryland-based community organizations. "It doesn't do any of us any good to talk aboutdeclining welfare rolls if we are forcing other people into unemployment," the governor said. "Our intention is to state very clearly: It's illegal, . . . and it's immoral." The fact thata politician can discern morality a lot faster in a roomful of registered voters has little todo with cynicism but says much about how the democratic process works-and has alwaysworked-in our country. On another issue, Glendening rejected the I.A.F. groups' proposalthat the state invest $90 million in a program to create 5,000 public-sector jobs.But the I.A.F., no doubt, will be back to fight this battle when it is bigger and stronger.Making progress toward a more just society may not be inevitable but it is possible,Alinsky believed-- and,as he once observed: "We'll see it when we believe it."http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky2.htm

Empowering People, Not Elites

Interview with Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky is, along with Thomas Paine,Henry George, andDorothy Day,one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left.Response toour earlier article dealing with Alinskyhas beenso great that we worked to obtain this extensive interviewwith him, conducted by Playboy magazine in 1972. It is, byfar, the most detailed conversation with Alinsky that weknow of. The interview will be appearing in weeklyinstallments here at The Progress Report.

Introduction