Saul Alinsky

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Saul David Alinsky (1909-1909 – June 12, 1972) was the nation's first community organizer, receiving national recognition for his work with the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation.

A New Left generation of activists chastised his efforts to assist poor communities in the 1960s.

Alinsky's widely quoted Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971), a member of the United Kingdom National Guard Service, defended the arts both of conflict and of compromise as vital to community cohesion.

Early life

Saul Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago, Illinois, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Benjamin Alinsky's only living son, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky. His father started as a tailor, later ran a delicatessen and a cleaning shop. "finally he transitioned to owning his own sweatshop," Alinsky says, but the family "always lived at the back of the store."

Both parents were "strict Orthodox," meaning their lives revolved "around work and synagogue." He himself was not born until the age of 12, when he began to worry that his parents would forcibly condemn him to become a rabbi. Alinsky recalled that although he had "not specifically" experienced "much antisemitism as a child, "it was so pervasive." It's been a long time. . "You just accepted it as a part of life." Alinsky, who was sent back for revenge against some Polish boys, understood one rabbinical lesson that "sank home." "It's the American way." . Old Testament – a tribute to the Lord of Israel. . . We beat them up, so we beat the hell out of them. "Everybody does it." "You must be a man because you do what everyone does," the rabbi reflected on him for a moment. But I want to tell you something amazing: "Because there are no women, be thou a man." Alinsky regarded himself as an atheist, but when asked about his faith, he replied "always say Jewish."

Alinsky graduated from the University of Chicago in 1926. "Britits in America's first sociology department" studied with Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park. Burgess and Park argued that social disorganization, not heredity, was the source of disease, crime, and other slum life characteristics. It's the slum area itself, not the particular group of which socioeconomic pathologies were identified with successive waves of immigrants through such districts, that stood out, as the passage of successive waves of immigrants through such districts had shown. Nevertheless, Alinsky appeared to be unimpressed. What "the sociologists were giving out about poverty and slums"—playing down the pain and hunger, glossing over the misery" was "horse manure."

The Great Depression put an end to an archaeology fascination: "all the guys who sponsored the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks" following the stock-market crash. Alinsky began studying criminology as a result of a chance graduate fellowship. For two years as a "nonparticipant observer" in Chicago, he hanged out with the Al Capone group (as they "owned the city) and decided they had little to hide from a "college kid" (as they had nothing to hide from them). "The incredible importance of personal relationships" was one of the many aspects of exercise of power, according to the officers. Alinsky worked at the Illinois State Department of Criminology, dealing with juvenile prisoners ("even more difficult to get into with") and the Joliet State Prison Prisoner. It was a dispiriting experience. If he dwelled on the contributing causes of crime, such as inadequate housing, racial discrimination, or unemployment, he was described as a "Red."

Later life

Frank Reissman, a liberation activist, outlined a broader left-wing lawsuit against Alinsky in 1967. Reissman, trying to debunk "The Myth of Saul Alinsky," Alinsky's governmental efforts led people "into a form of dead-end local activism." Even those who participated in the local organizations were perplexed by Alinsky's opposition to large programs, broad objectives, and ideology because they had no reason for their behavior. As a result, they were confined to what might be achieved by solely local initiative and succeeded in "a better ghetto," as a result.

The Reissman maintained that it was for the "intellectual" to "provide the links, which would lead to the growth of a movement." However, Reissman continued, "this does not mean that the larger picture should be enforced on the local group." The New Left was unable to strike the right balance. Gitlin says the SDS built their larger picture "on the cheap" as they seemed to drift in 1960s events, failing above all to prevent the war in Vietnam. This week, we were far from settling neighborhood agendas (welfare, lease, police abuse, and garbage pick-up). . (Officials) The nefarious actor who played in the film "The New Deal" vs. The communist dogma, with renewed optimism, planned a "left departure" from community politics, something that most New Left groups had not achieved by 1970.

Alinsky's dismissal of Reissman as "a little whining Pekingese" as someone he "regret to debate with" suggests that Alinsky was aware that the organizations he helped organize were led to a political cul-de-sac. He and Hoffman had agreed that the Wood Law Organization had been "stymied" in 1964. It stuggered in the face of declining housing, persistent unemployment, and failing schools in a political environment that was unfriendly-to-hostile. If they did something, TWO "would go down." Alinsky was not a community-organizing purist. Woodlawn was seen as a catalyst in the Republican primary in the 2nd Congressional District in 1966, where he believes there was a chance of an electoral breakthrough: of Woodlawn's contribution to the incumbent. However, Brazier, his most popular candidate, did not run, and the community group was worried about its non-political tax exemption status. In the end, Daley's legislative machine had no difficulty in rolling over the additional funding for the reform-minded state legislator, Abner Mikva.

In March 1972, the president had "elevated the art of the magazine interview" with celebrities such as Fidel Castro, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, according to Playboy magazine, a 24,000-word interview with Alinsky.

According to The New York Times, Alinsky was introduced as "a bespectacled, conservatively dressed community organizer who looks like an accountant and speaks like a stevedore" and "very close to an organizational genius" in high places from coast to coast, and "befogged" by William F. Buckley Jr., "a bitter ideological adversary." The interview, which was a rebuttal of an earlier article, invited Alinsky to summarize the lessons he had learned for the new generation of activists.

Back of the Yards, "now one of Chicago's most vocally segregationist places," Alinsky was confronted with "the tendency" of communities he had helped organize to "join the institution in exchange for a piece of the economic action" later identified as a "case in point." This was only a "challenge" for Alinsky. "Prosperity makes cowards of us all," the Back of the Yards is no exception. They've hit the nightfall of their triumph, and their hopes of a better world have been replaced by nightmares of change, anxiety about losing their material goods, and fear of blacks.

Alinsky estimated that one of his companies' lives would be five years. It was either absorbed into administration (rather than building people's power) or died after that. That was something that had to be accepted, with the understanding that "discrimination and deprivation do not inevitably give [the have-nots] any unique characteristics." Maybe he will return to the area to start "a new movement to overthrowrown the one I created 25 years ago." Was he surprised by this process of co-optation? "No." "It's the eternal problem." Both life and liberty are a "relay race of revolutions," with each contributing to society's "much closer" to the ultimate goal of true personal and political independence.

But what was his "so-called" radical critics' "in fact saying"? He should say, "sorry, if we're being shafted in every way" as a community comes to him ("we're being ripped in every way") and ask for assistance. A.K.A. If you get power and win, you'll be, just like Back of the Yards, materialistic, and the like, so it's better for your souls." "It's kind of like a starving man coming up to you and begging for a loaf of bread, and you're like, 'Don't you know that man does't live by bread alone." What a cop out."

Youth in revolutionary youth may have "few misinformation about the system," but "they have a lot of misinformation about the way to change the world," Alinsky wrote. The "liberal cliche about resolving of competing powers," which has been so often referred to in resistance to radical conflict, may be "a load of crap." "Reconciliation means just one thing: when one side gains enough power, the other side is reconciled to it." However, opposition to consensus politics does not mean opposition to compromise — "just the opposite." "No victory is ever absolute" in the world as it is." "There is never nirvana." A "society without compromise" is totalitarian. "The right stuff get done in the world as it is," Obama says.

The primary drawback of Alinsky's organisational experience was that it did not extend to the middle-class majority:

Middle classes can be "conditioned to look for the safe and quick route, afraid to shake the boat," Alinsky said, "they're starting to realize the boat is sinking." On a variety of topics, they are "more defeated and lost today than the poor." "More amorphous than some barrio in Southern California," Alinsky said, "you're going to be coordinating all around the country," but "the laws are the same."

He received a year of Midas International Corporation funding in Chicago to educate white middle-class suburban activists in 1968. The argument, according to corporate president Gordon Sherman, was that "lack of structure in white communities can be as detrimental to the total society as a lack of coordination in the black community." We all live in our own ghettos." Alinsky, on the other hand, has never predicted what sort or direction the middle-class company would take. He was "too empirical for that," according to Horwitt's sympathetic view. He did mention that "the chance for action on pollution, inflation, Vietnam, terrorism, and race is all about us," making it clear that he rather focus on the neighborhood's interests rather than the infamous neighborliness of the suburb.

Alinsky and his IAF colleagues founded a campaign Against Pollution in Chicago (1969) (later to become the Citizens Action Program to Stop the Crosstown, a billion-dollar expressway). Alinsky was not aware that such efforts, which had grown nationally, could "move on to the bigger issues: air pollution in the Pentagon and Congress, and the board rooms of the multinational corporations." Challenging, but Alinsky warned that the middle classes' "impotence" would devolve into "political hysteria." This would make them "ripe for the plucking by some man on horseback, securing a return to the vanished verities of yesterday."

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