Alinsky, Saul David

ALINSKY, SAUL DAVID (1909–1972). Born to orthodox Jewish Russian immigrants, Alinsky was raised and educated in Chicago and came of age amid the radical ferment of the Great Depression. The “Alinsky method” of community organizing, for which he is best known, was shaped in the late 1930s by his involvement with initial efforts to organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), his contact with community efforts sponsored by the Communist Party during its Popular Front period, and his youth work with the innovative Chicago Area Project (CAP).

In the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC), which he organized with neighborhood resident Joseph Meegan in 1939, Alinsky combined his prior experiences into a blueprint for community organizing: (1) develop a pragmatic “trade union in the social factory” where people at the neighborhood level can bargain, strike, struggle, and advance their interests as they did in the CIO, (2) create a power-oriented community organization willing to use militant, conflict tactics like the Unemployed Councils but without the council’s ideology or Party-building objective, and (3) promote a democratic organization, such as CAP, in which organizers do not lead but rather develop indigenous leaders and in which the process of tapping into self-interest and converting it to collective action reveals the progressive nature of grass-roots democracy. The initial BYNC was a classic project of the Popular Front period. At this time, Alinsky saw himself as a “professional antifascist” and the Council as a skillfully organized coalition of all sectors of Back of the Yards—residents, merchants, clergy, and packinghouse union organizers, who were Party members. The enemy was outside the neighborhood—factory owners and local officials, not to mention fascism abroad and at home.

Throughout his life Alinsky was a defender of the downtrodden, a sharp critic and antagonist of concentrated power and privilege. Before 1947 this tied him closely with Left efforts. He was an irreverent tough guy, characteristic of his generation, who strongly identified with John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers. His Reveille for Radicals (1946) was both a call to arms and an introduction to how to build neighborhood-based “People’s Organizations”. But in the repressive context of Cold War America, the Alinsky method and initial efforts like the BYNC turned more conservative. The BYNC became a powerful neighborhood organization in Chicago, but known more for its segregationist stands than its progressive organizing. In 1958 Alinsky even consulted with the Archbishop in Italy on stopping the Italian Communist Party from making further inroads with Catholic workers.

By the 1960s, the “professional antifascist” had become an “urban populist,” committed to empowering largely poor, mostly Black residents (building on the momentum of the civil rights movement and the fear of Black militancy) with an organizing method and a set of tactics. His “nonideological” organizing, advanced through the Industrial Areas Foundation and funded by department store magnet Marshall Field, became popular in the 1960s among groups seeking an indigenous-based progressive alternative to the turbulence of the era. His Rules for Radicals, written just before his sudden death in 1972, is best known for Alinsky’s more specific codification of community organizing than in Reveille. But it was also a sharp critique of New Left activism. His rules have since been used by both Left and Right.

In the 1970s and 1980s neo-Alinsky organizers in groups such as ACORN and training institutes such as the Midwest Academy modified and expanded the Alinsky method by using New Left ideas of participatory democracy and conflict tactics from civil rights, black power, and feminist movements. The goal of groups like ACORN was to create a grassroots, majoritarian, Left strategy more expansive and movement-oriented than single neighborhood efforts. Ironically, the Alinsky method of grassroots progressive change and building power through strong organizations benefitted from the changing political contexts of the 1960s and 1970s and the broad social movements of the era, while at the same time remaining distant from them. Even now, descendants of Alinsky distinguish professional organizers like those in the IAF from non-trained and loosely organized movement activists.

Alinsky was a brilliant tactician and demanding organizer whose work, perhaps more than that of any other individual, reflected and advanced the two dominant shifts in organizing since the 1960s—from the factory to the community as the locus of organizing and from using a radical ideology to mobilize people to a “non-ideological” pluralistic politics, more about building power and changing governing systems from within than the transformative theory and goals of Left efforts In the 1970s and 1980s this was a limited but more accurate analysis than Marxist-Leninist/Maoist groups at the time, which saw community-based organizing as petit-bourgeois and that real organizing only occurred on factory assembly-lines.

In response to current widespread interest in community organizing in the United States and abroad, resultant from Barack Obama’s experience in Alinsky organizing with the Gamaliel Foundation and the vicious attacks against Obama and community organizing during the 2008 campaign, most Left critics and movement activists began to emphasize community organizing’s deeper and broader historical roots. These critics and activists center their work in the contributions and critiques of Black, Feminist, and Queer organizers and critics who have been largely left out of debates on the nature and roots of community organizing. The systemic justice orientation of these efforts has more in common with the Black Power Movement than with the discrete, locality-based organizing which characterized early Alinsky efforts, as well as the congregation-based model that later became the overriding approach of Alinsky organizing. For example, earlier views considered Alinsky the father of community organizing, similar to what Freud was to psychotherapy, the person who first codified the practice. Feminists found Freud wanting, and social movement critics, especially from feminist and Black Liberation orientations, find Alinsky wanting, arguing that “Alinsky discovered community organizing like Columbus discovered America.”

Often, as with Black Lives Matter and affiliated groups, these recent efforts –– both pre- and post-Alinsky –– center oppressed identities and are openly socialist in orientation, combining ideology, a structural critique, and a grounding in prior resistance campaigns. In many cases, these organizers have been trained in “post-Alinsky,” radical Left organizing of the 1970s, and see themselves as part of contemporary social movements. Recent Black Liberation movements, especially, advance deeper and more structural critiques than the Alinsky method, emphasizing the roles of neoliberalism and late capitalism as well as centuries old Black Liberation struggles against systems of slavery and caste. Socialist feminist and radical feminist critiques emerging out of the women's movements have also argued for greater diversity to address unequal positionalities within organizing and the need for leadership by marginalized populations. Such community organizing/social movement efforts include, for example, the Los Angeles-based Labor/Community Strategy Center and City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston, as well as the less-ideological but more far reaching organizing and training associated with ACORN and the Midwest Academy.

Organizing on the Left has been scattered and fragmented since the 1970s. More recent efforts now seek to build stronger national and grassroots effort, and to build more lasting resistance to new and historic forms of oppression and inequality. The growing threat of fascism has seen an increase in the willingness of these organizations and identity groups to build intersectional coalitions and to cross longstanding divides and boundaries such as (1) race, class, and gender; (2) orthodoxies concerning whether the site of organizing must be the community or the workplace; (3) local versus national scale and (4) organizing versus social movement activism. We may well need a blending of the best of both old and new social movement theory and practice, combining them to build a united front similar to but more advanced than the 1930s and rainbow coalition efforts since the 1960s.

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Schutz, Aaron and Mike Miller (Eds). People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015.