Re: ALINSKY and STALIN vs. SARTRE

I am quite critical of Alinsky myself, for many of the reasons Jonathan
Feldman lists.  I posted the earlier piece because I was interested in
heading off a sterile debate about "means and ends" based on empty moralism.
And under no circumstances did I want a circle-jerk about Kronstadt -- if
people want to do that elsewhere, with halfwit anarchists lining up on one
side and ridiculously grim Marxist-Leninists lining up on the other,
debating how many Bolshevik soldiers fell through the ice or how many
prisoners were shot, there are plenty of other places to do that on the
Internet.

That said, Alinsky's "non-ideological" approach to organizing is itself
ideological.  He wrote much of *Rules for Radicals* not so much in response
to the "anarchistic" tendencies of the New Left, but in reaction to the
absorption of much of the New Left into the dream-world of the sects, which
were reactionary in the sense that Paulo Freire talked about.  For that
reason his outlook is understandable, though not adequate.

Without a socialist analysis, Alinsky's model becomes the handbook for
people who are engaged in very particularistic and even parochial struggles.
Some time ago list contributor Hunterbear wrote of how Alinsky's "Back of
the Yards" neighborhood organization in Chicago -- organized primarily in
white ethnic neighborhoods -- had become a bulwark of the racist Daley
political machine by the time Jon Salter/Hunterbear was organizing there in
the 1960s.  Alinsky's approach was that you organize people to "get what
they want" (one of the assumptions being, of course, that the
"non-ideological" organizer has no agenda of his/her own, which is
ridiculous).  In practice this can mean adapting to all sorts of backward
ideas among the people rather than trying to organize people for progressive
change, all the while finding ways to root out reactionary ideas and
practices (which is what a socialist organizer -- assuming we're talking
about an effective one, and not a sectarian onanist -- does).  So an
Alinsky-style neighborhood organization might just as likely try to get a
strip club kicked out of the neighborhood as try to fight slumlords, or it
may jockey with other rival neighborhood organizations to see whose
neighborhood will get the low-wage employer with publicly-allocated
"economic development" dollars.

Nevertheless I think Alinsky's points about means and ends stand, even if we
also argue that it is important to have a socialist perspective.  The
question, he says, is never "Does the end justify the means?" but "Does this
*particular* end justify this *particular* means?"  Assuming you are
operating on socialist principles, you may often answer this question with a
NO.  

Let's say, for example, that you want to fight price-gouging and
exploitation of poor communities, and that the majority of store owners in
the neighborhood where you're organizing are of Korean ethnicity and the
vast majority of people in the neighborhood are not (they're black or Latino
or white or Filipino -- it doesn't matter much for the purposes of our
analysis).  There's a lot of frustration in the community and you could, if
you so chose, mobilize people to protest outside the stores by appealing to
racist characterizations of Koreans.  Yet even though you're a savvy
organizer, you choose not to do that, because your END is not just to put a
stop to price-gouging in neighborhood stores (though you fully intend to do
that) but to bring about a society without racism and exploitation.
Therefore the particular END of ending price-gouging does not justify the
particular MEANS of whipping up race-hatred, because you have a greater and
more important END in mind of bringing an end to racism and exploitation
entirely -- bringing about socialism, that is.

The example is a very simple one on which none of us are going to disagree,
although there are countless examples in real life in which there are many
more shades of gray.  The point is that Alinsky's approach, with its
(supposed) value-neutrality, is not the be-all and end-all of organizing for
truly progressive social transformation.  Nevertheless, a dose of Alinsky
can be a salutary antidote to the tendency of too many activists to avoid
thinking about power, or the tendency of sectarianism, or the idea that
politics is about grandstanding and moral witnessing rather than organizing
people to make actual change.

John Lacny


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